Project Mailer - User contributions [en]

User talk:Grlucas

2025-04-20T23:13:11Z

Chelsey.brantley: /* Article Completed */ new section

{{Talk header}}
[[/Archive 202504/]]

== Final edits ==
Hello, my article is complete: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Ernest_and_Norman_(Exit_Music)|Ernest and Norman (Exit Music)]]
:{{Reply to|Flowersbloom}} great, thank you. I made some corrections. Please be sure to sign your talk page posts. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Good evening, Dr. Lucas. Below is the link to my edited article:
https://projectmailer.net/pm/User:ASpeed/sandbox
:{{Reply to|ASpeed}} great. Let me know when it’s finished and posted, and I’l have a look. It appears as if you still have a bit of work to do. Please be sure to sign your talk page posts. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Good evening, @[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]. I have completed most of my Remediation Articles, but I still show issues for the one named, "[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman,_Papa,_and_the_Autoerotic_Construction_of_Woman|Norman, Papa, and the Autoerotic Construction of Woman]].

Based on the latest updates, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Battles_for_Regard,_Writerly_and_Otherwise|Battles for Regard, Writerly and Otherwise]] looks good with exception of including a '''category'''.
:{{Reply to|ALedezma}} this one is good. I made some corrections before removing the banner, mostly in your sources. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

May you let me know if there is anything I can do on my end to resolve the issues with the first [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman,_Papa,_and_the_Autoerotic_Construction_of_Woman|article]]?

[[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 21:47, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|ALedezma}} looking very good, but some sources missing page numbers. Please see to those. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

:::Thank you @[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] . I will review those and respond when complete. [[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 22:47, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::::@[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]. Thank you for your feedback. A review of article additions was made for source pages. [[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 20:22, 11 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::{{Reply to| ALedezma}} ok, looking good. I made some corrections. There's one final thing to do: no footnotes should appear in the notes section; use {{tl|harvtxt}} instead; I did one to show you how to use the template. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:39, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
::::::@[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] Changes were done to footnote sources. Thank you! [[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 19:59, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas I finished my remediation article https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer%27s_The_Fight:_Hemingway,_Bullfighting,_and_the_Lovely_Metaphysics_of_Boxing&action=edit [[User:TWietstruk|TWietstruk]] ([[User talk:TWietstruk|talk]]) 19:44, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| TWietstruk}} good work so far, but there is more to do: placement of footnotes (eliminate spaces around them and punctuation always goes ''before'' the footnote.); proofread for typos; fix all red errors at the bottom (most of these are from errors in sourcing); works cited entries should be bulleted list and eliminate space between entries. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:05, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Final edit and no errors with some help from @NRMMGA5108, @JKilchenmann. Please mark me as complete. On to help someone else with the things I've learned
https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer%27s_The_Fight:_Hemingway,_Bullfighting,_and_the_Lovely_Metaphysics_of_Boxing&action=edit [[User:TWietstruk|TWietstruk]] ([[User talk:TWietstruk|talk]]) 17:52, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas I have finished my assigned remediation article: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Jive-Ass_Aficionado:_Why_Are_We_in_Vietnam%3F_and_Hemingway%27s_Moral_Code#cite_note-FOOTNOTEHemingway2003-24
Username ADear.
:{{Reply to|ADear}} thank you. I have marked this as complete. Please be sure you sign your talk page posts correctly. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:05, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I have finished remediating my assigned article. Please review it at your earliest convenience. The link is here: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer's_Mythmaking_in_An_American_Dream_and_“The_White_Negro”|Norman Mailer's Mythmaking in An American Dream and “The White Negro”]]—[[User:Erhernandez|Erhernandez]] ([[User talk:Erhernandez|talk]]) 08:52, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Erhernandez}} well done! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. I removed your banner after making a few corrections. Please have a look over it and move on to the next thing. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:06, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I transferred and edited my article. Can you look at it and remove the banner? Here's the link: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Authorship_and_Alienation_in_Death_in_the_Afternoon_and_Advertisements_for_Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself]] ( [[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 13:02, 28 March 2025 (EDT) )
:{{Reply to| APKnight25}} looking good! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. Next, eliminate all "fang" quotes in the article and add “real quotation marks.” Your sources should be a bulleted list. And there should be no space before a citation. You’re almost finished! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:21, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Reinventing the Wheel" Mailer Article for Review ==

Dr. Lucas,

My [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Reinventing_a_New_Wheel:_The_Films_of_Norman_Mailer|article]] is ready for review.

Thank you!
[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 15:29, 29 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|TPoole}} great! Could you include a link to it? Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:07, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
::OK, I [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer|found it]]. Looking really good. Great work. There are some citation issues that need to be seen to. The two red categories at the bottom should not be there; they will go away when the citations errors are corrected. Eliminate any quotation mark "fangs" in the text and replace them with “real quotation marks.” Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:14, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:::@Grlucas, what are the citation issues? Which ones need correcting? [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 17:31, 31 March 2025 (EDT)
::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} When you click your citations, they should jump to the works cited entry they correspond to. Several of yours do not, indicated by the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” at the bottom. You also have a "CS1 maint: Unrecognized language" error that will likely be cleared up when you fix the citation issues. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:55, 1 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::@Grlucas, I have tried correcting the sfn codes in my citations. I was able to get the 2 web citations to link correctly. But for some reason, I cannot get the Mailer 1967 film Wild 90 citation to link to the reference list. Please advise. [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 20:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
::::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} OK, all fixed and published. Thanks. Please move on to another remediation. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:46, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of: "Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of 'Totalitarianism'" ==

Dr. Lucas

I finished the remediation of the following article:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Contradictory_Syntheses:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Left_Conservatism_and_the_Problematic_of_%E2%80%9CTotalitarianism%E2%80%9D

It is ready for your review. Thank you.
[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 19:04, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} looks great. I made some tweaks to the references and some throughout, like changing ' and " to real apostrophes and quotation marks. A bit more clean-up, but you might want to check over it again. I removed the under-construction banner. Well one. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 21:32, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edit ==

Thank you for your comments on my remediation of
"[[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself.]]"

I've eliminated the "fang quotes" and changed them to “real quotation marks.” This was a very fascinating tip that taught me something new. It's something I've never noticed before but now always will.

I also put my sources in a bulleted list and removed the space before the citations. I think I'm all set now.
:{{Reply to|APKnight25}} great work! Please help other editors to complete the volume. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:34, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Firearms in the Works of Hemingway and Mailer'' ==

[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]

Hi Dr. Lucas,

I believe I have done everything for the Remediation of my article. Please let me know if there is anything else I need to do.

I will also link the article below:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Firearms_in_the_Works_of_Hemingway_and_Mailer

Thank you,
Caitlin Vinson
:{{Reply to|CVinson}} great work so far. Your references must use templates, please. Blockquotes must also be done correctly. No spaces or line breaks before or after the {{tl|pg}} template. Footnote placement is also off (punctuation goes before the footnote; no spaces before or after the footnote). I will add the abstract and url. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:30, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Hi Dr. Lucas, I believe there have been some updates made to the project. I believe I have also updated the works cited section to show correct templates. Please let me know if there is anything further that I need to do. Thank you, Caitlin.
::{{reply to| CVinson}} please sign your talk page posts correctly. Thanks. You still need to do some work on the sources. Use the <code>|author-mask=1</code> in your template for repeated author names. Also, you must eliminate the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” message at the bottom. No spaces or returns before or after the {{tl|pg}} call, as I already mentioned above. No parenthetical citations should be left, either; those should all be remediated to footnotes. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:50, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:::{{Reply to|Grlucas}} I have updated the sources and updated the in-text citations. I am still having trouble with the "Harv and Sfn no-target errors." I have not been successful in fixing this error and have tried multiple ways to fix it. —[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 8:18, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

::::{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Hi Dr. Lucas, I see that I still have a red X for my remediation assignment. Is there something else I am still missing? —[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:35, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::{{reply to| CVinson}} sorry, I'm just getting back to it. There are quite a few punctuation errors. Some left out and others appear after the {{tl|sfn}}. I'm trying to correct those I see, but you should have a look, too. Page is designated as <code>p=</code> in {{tl|sfn}}, not <code>pg=</code>; and a span of pages needs <code>pp=</code>. Again, I have tried to correct these. I removed the banner, but please have another look through. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:01, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norman Mailer Today'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up my remediation article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Norman Mailer Today|Norman Mailer Today]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 18:20, 3 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Kamyers}} Great work! Please help your fellow editors finish the volume, or pick something to work on in [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010|Volume 4]]. Thanks, and well done. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:00, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of “The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’” ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished my remediation of Jennifer Yirinec's article: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”|The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.”]] Thank you for your assistance with the article. It is ready for its final review! [[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 10:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} a stellar job. Well done. I removed the banner, so you can move on to another article. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:12, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediations ==
Dr. Lucas, I have begun work on the tributes for volume 5. [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Grace Notes|Grace Notes]] by Stephen Borkowski is ready for its final review.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 12:58, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} Well done! Banner removed, url added. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:18, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

==Oohh Normie Final Edits==
Hi Dr. Lucas, I have finished my article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/"Oohh_Normie_—_You're_Sooo_Hemingway":_Mailer_Memories_and_Encounters|Oohh Normie, You're Sooo Hemingway]]. Please let me know if there is anything I need to fix. [[User:Tbara4554|Tbara4554]] ([[User talk:Tbara4554|talk]]) 20:01, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Tbara4554}} thank you. I made some corrections and removed the banner. You might want to have another look over it. Please move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:53, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Harlot's Ghost, Bildungsroman, Masculinity and Hemingway ==

Dr. Lucas,

The following article is ready for your review. Thanks.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Harlot%27s_Ghost,_Bildungsroman,_Masculinity_and_Hemingway

[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 21:22, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} excellent. Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:39, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== I am done with this ==

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Situating_Hemingway:_Mailer,_Style,_Ethics
:Received. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:29, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Review PM Article ==

Hi Dr. Lucas, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Hemingway_to_Mailer_—_A_Delayed_Response_to_The_Deer_Park|here]] is my remediated article, ready for review![[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 12:21, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Hobbitonya}} great work. I have removed the banner, so you are good to move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:20, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Project ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have finished my remedidation project and I am ready for it to be reviewed. '''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe]

Thanks,

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 13:04, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} good work so far. Please remove wikilinks. Change ' and " to typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. And all red errors at the bottom of the page need to be taken care of. These are likely all from coding errors in your sources. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:24, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have removed the wikilinks, changed to the correct typographic style and updated my sources.
'''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe] Thanks, [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:55, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

[I forgot to fill out the summary box. I am adding my summary]
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} you're getting there! It looks great. You must eliminate all the red errors at the bottom. These appear when there are errors in your citations. Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:15, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

@{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have tried everything I can think of and I still have harv and sfn no-target errors and harv and sfn multiple-target errors and cs1 uses editors parameter. Do I not include the editor? [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 16:03, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have managed to get rid of two of the red target errors. I am still working on finding the harv sfn multiple target error. Thanks, [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 20:37, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have tried everything i can think of to remove the last red error flag. I had to turn it in. I don't know that else I can do in this situation. I was given citation that did not follow any of the given formats. [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:45, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} all parenthetical citations must be remediated to {{tl|sfn}}; none of yours are. Get these done, then we can worry about the errors. (Some notes on sources: any generic <code><nowiki>{{citation}}</nowiki></code> will not be correct. I see you have a book review by Marshall that has no source (I tried to find the original and cannot; this is a weird citation; I'll continue to look for it). There's also one that looks like a film that should use the [[w:Template:Cite AV media|<code>Cite AV media</code> template]].) Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:16, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Submission ==

Hello!
Here's my remediated article; [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/The_Devil's_Party:_Reading_and_Wreaking_Vengeance_in_The_Castle_in_the_Forest|The Devil's Party: Reading and Wreaking Vengeance in ''The Castle in the Forest'']].
Thanks! Please let me know if there's anything I can review or correct.
[[User:Maggiemrogers|Maggiemrogers]] ([[User talk:Maggiemrogers|talk]]) 13:23, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Maggiemrogers}} nice work! Banner removed, so please move on to something else in the volume. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:39, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Vol. 4: Rumors of Grace article remediated ==

I believe I have completed remediation of ''[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Rumors_of_Grace:_God-Language_in_Hemingway_and_Mailer|Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer]]'', vol. 4. I was having last-minute trouble with sfn errors for sources without authors, but Justin Kilchenmann helped me out, so I think they are fixed.
:{{Reply to|Sherrilledwards}} You have done a remarkable job—a real Herculean effort! Footnotes should not go in any notes. See those I changed; the others should be changed in the same way. I have done some, but the others have to be fixed, I'm afraid. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:20, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to|Grlucas}}I believe I have completed these fixes, so the article is again ready for review. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 15:49, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
:::{{Reply to| Sherrilledwards}} truly exceptional work—a model remediation! Marked as complete. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:30, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Inside Norman Mailer ==

Hi Dr. Lucas - I have finished remediating the article, [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Inside Norman Mailer|Inside Norman Mailer]]. Please let me know if I need to make any adjustments. Thank you! [[User:Chelsey.brantley|Chelsey.brantley]] ([[User talk:Chelsey.brantley|talk]]) 18:09, 7 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Chelsey.brantley}} good work! Please help with another article from volume 4. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:36, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed: Norman Mailer: Playboy Magazine ==

I hope I am doing this is right. I have finished remediating my article about Norman Mailer and its in my designated sandbox [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer:_Playboy_Magazine_Heavyweight here.]
If there are any last minute edits, let me know. I got the last of the errors removed yesterday. And I believe we are on the same page with leaving the in-line citations for ''Playboy'' to be as is, since the author didn't put them down in the works cited. [[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 20:14, 7 April 2025 (EDT)Nina Mizner
:{{Reply to|NrmMGA5108}} looking good! So, the parenthetical citations still in the article, I'm assuming, are there because of those missing sources? Please check your page numbers; some seem to be off. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:04, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} I found the page number error and its corrected, and yes all the parenthetical citations should be referencing issues of the ''playboy'' magazine, which were not listed in the works cited. --[[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 20:54, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| NrmMGA5108}} it looks great. I removed the banner! Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:29, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed Remediation From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity? ==

Greeting Dr. Lucas,

I have made the adjustment that you mentioned.

I also made additional edits to my short footnotes and noticed that my citations did not link to my references - which has been fixed.

I have tested all of my citations, and they all work.

Here is my article by Alexander Hicks, ''From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity?''

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/From_Here_to_Eternity_and_The_Naked_and_the_Dead:_Premiere_to_Eternity%3F

Have a great day.
:{{Reply to| THarrell}} Please always sign your talk page posts. Several “quoted items” in the article appear as ‘quoted items’; these must be corrected, please. No spaces or returns should surround {{tl|pg}} calls. Multiple page numbers should look like this <code><nowiki>{{sfn|Moretti|1996|pp=11-14}}</nowiki></code>; note the double <code>pp</code>. There seem to be many typos. I corrected some for you, but you must see to the rest. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:16, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Greetings,

Are these the only additional corrections that need to be made? This is different from what you mentioned before.

I just want to be sure that I have hit everything.

Also can you verify what other typos you are seeing, I have ran through this twice.

If something is spelt a certain way, for example "Soljer", I have left it that way. Since it is mentioned like that in the article.
—[[User:THarrell|THarrell]] ([[User talk:THarrell|talk]]) 06:49, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Greetings,

I have gone through and fixed all of the short footnotes.

I have gone line by line with a ruler to look at any typos, and fixed the words that I found that had a dash in them/needed to be lowercased.

I have also fixed the quotations.

—[[User:THarrell|THarrell]] ([[User talk:THarrell|talk]]) 12:31, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| THarrell}} much better. Periods go inside quotations marks; I think I fixed these, but please check. Also, there are no spaces before footnotes; again, I did a find/replace, but you should check. Also, check that all titles of novels are italicized (if it's italicized in the PDF, then it has to be italicized in the remediation, including abbreviations, like ''Naked''); I fixed a couple. Also, no extra spaces; there should only be a single blank space between paragraphs. There are quite a few little details that needed (need?) fixing. I removed the banner, but please check my work. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 12:41, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon” ==

Greetings Dr. Lucus,

My article is ready for your review. Thank you.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer%E2%80%99s_%E2%80%9CFootnote_to_Death_in_the_Afternoon%E2%80%9D)
:{{Reply to| KForeman}} it's coming along. Please ''always'' sign your talk page posts. Right up top, there are errors. Please use the real {{tl|pg}}, like all the other articles. Citations need to be fixed. All parenthetical citations must be converted. You still have quite a bit of work to do. All red sections need to be seen to and corrected. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:20, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
@Grlucs, per your suggestions, I've made the corrections. Please review. I look forward to your feedback. Thank you.
:{{Reply to| KForeman}} looking better. All parenthetical page numbers should be removed and added to the {{tl|sfn}}. Check your page numbers in {{tl|pg}}. Footnotes should have no spaces around them; periods and commas go ''inside'' quotation marks and before the footnotes. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:28, 19 April 2025 (EDT)

=Remediation of "Cluster Seeds and the Mailer Legacy"=
Hello, Dr. Lucas. I have completed the remediation of [https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Cluster_Seeds_and_the_Mailer_Legacy&oldid=18200| my article], and it is ready for your review. Thank you!—[[User:ADavis|ADavis]] ([[User talk:ADavis|talk]]) 11:32, 8 April 2025 (EDT)@ADavis
:{{Reply to| ADavis}} got it. I think I check it yesterday and removed the banner then. Please move on to another piece. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediating Article: Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing Volume 4. ==

Hello Dr. Lucas,

I have completed remediating my article. Here is the link [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing|The Mailer Review: Volume 4: Mailer, Hemingway, Boxing (2010)]] [[User:JBrown|JBrown]] ([[User talk:JBrown|talk]]) 13:01, 8 April 2025 (EDT)JBrown
:{{Reply to|JBrown}} a good start, but all parenthetical citations need to be footnotes. Also, check your headers. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norris Church Mailer'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up remediating the article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norris Church Mailer|Norris Church Mailer]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 13:42, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Kamyers}} awesome work! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edits Completed and Ready for Review ==

Dr. Lucas, I have completed my assigned remediation article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Looking_at_the_Past:_Nostalgia_as_Technique_in_The_Naked_and_the_Dead_and_For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls|Looking at the Past: Nostalgia as Technique in The Naked and the Dead and For Whom the Bell Tolls]]. Please review at your convenience. I enjoyed working on this assignment. I look forward to your suggestions and feedback. All the best, Danielle (DBond007)
:{{Reply to| DBond007}} ok, good work. Please remove all the external links. Links to Wikipedia are not necessary, but if used, they need to be done correctly. There should be no spaces before {{tl|sfn}}. May sure all your ' and " are actually typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. Remove any superfluous spaces and line breaks; these mess up the formatting. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Thank you. I will get started on these revisions immediately. Thanks for the feedback and your time. :)[[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 11:30, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| Grlucas}} I have completed all the requested revisions and ready for review round 2. Thank you again![[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 12:10, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:::{{Reply to|DBond007}} looking better! There are still items to be seen to, like titles on novels and magazines need to appear like they do in the original: if it's italicized in the PDF, it must be italicized on the web. I added the epigram for you and corrected that pesky citation. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:41, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| Grlucas}}I have completed edits. I went through and took out quotes around The Time Machine, except for one instance that the author uses them. All my other titles seem to correspond to the original article. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you for the epigram and the pesky citation correction. Best, [[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 15:25, 17 April 2025 (EDT)
:::{{Reply to|DBond007}} received, and good work. I had to clean up the sources a bit, so you might want to have a look. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:42, 18 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| Grlucas}}I went back and reviewed some of the other articles marked complete to compare and look for remaining revisions. I made one change on Works Cited and also added the page numbers to correspond to the pdf. Let's try this again. Again, I *believe I am finished with this article. Best,[[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 10:36, 18 April 2025 (EDT)

Hopefully this works!. I'm not sure how to reply to other threads, but I was scrolling through the PDF and noticed the publisher is Iowa Pres? Just curious if it's supposed to be Iowa Press? [[User:Wverna|Wverna]] ([[User talk:Wverna|talk]]) 22:33, 18 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Wverna}} I'm not sure what you're talking about. Perhaps if you included a link to the article? See [[w:Help:Talk pages|Talk page guidelines]] if you don't know how to use them. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:33, 19 April 2025 (EDT)
Just kidding, I responded to the wrong "Bell Tolls' article. I was referring to this one: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Tolls_of_War:_Mailerian_Sub-Texts_in_For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls sorry about that! [[User:Wverna|Wverna]] ([[User talk:Wverna|talk]]) 17:49, 19 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed the remediation assignment ==

Good evening Dr. Lucas,

I hope I am doing this right. Here is the link for my completed Remediation articles: [http://The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Encounters_with_Mailer Encounters with Mailer].

&

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Effects_of_Trauma_on_the_Narrative_Structures_of_Across_the_River_and_Into_the_Trees_and_The_Naked_and_the_Dead

I look forward to reading your feedback.

All the best,

Patrick Riley
:{{Reply to|Priley1984}} thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:40, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Project Submission: An Expected Encounter in an Unexpected Place ==

Link:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer:_An_Expected_Encounter_in_an_Unexpected_Place

Winnie Verna
:{{Reply to|Wverna}} received, thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:51, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== E.Mosley ==

Good evening, @Grlucas. I have completed my Remediation Articles[[https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/On_Reading_Mailer_Too_Young]]. The article I had was " On Reading Mailer Too Young Volume 4, 2010
:{{Reply to| Essence903m}} thank you. I had to fix and clean-up quite a bit. Your saves also do not include summaries. When you move on to your next article, please be more careful and follow the instructions. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:12, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Kynndra Watson ==

Good Evening, @grlucas. i have completed my Remediation articles: Volume 5: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Making_Masculinity_and_Unmaking_Jewishness:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Voice_in_Wild_90_and_Beyond_the_Law and Volume 4: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer,_Hemingway,_and_the_%E2%80%9CReds%E2%80%9D.

Thank you.
:{{Reply to| KWatson}} thank you, and this is a good start, but there are still many items that need to be cleaned up, like footnote indications (They go after punctuation), citation errors (all the red errors at the bottom need to be seen to), extra spaces and ALL CAPS need to be removed. Please see other completed articles for models. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:18, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/What Would Be the Fun of That?|"What Would Be the Fun of That?"]] by Peter Alson.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:33, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} awesome! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:21, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== “Remembering Norris Church” Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Remembering Norris Church|“Remembering Norris Church”]] by John Bowers.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 16:17, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} and again, excellent! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:22, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== “The Norris I Knew” Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/The Norris I Knew|“The Norris I Knew”]] by Christopher Busa.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:04, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} rockin’! 👍🏼 —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:24, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Norris Mailer" Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Norris Mailer|"Norris Mailer"]] by Nancy Collins.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:35, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} thanks again. You’re tearing it up. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:32, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Rise Above It" Tribute Remediation ==

Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Rise Above It|"Rise Above It"]] by David Ebershoff—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 11:12, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} excellent. Many thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:15, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed Additional Articles ==

Hello, Dr. Lucas. I have remediated [https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Tributes_to_Norris_Church_Mailer/A_View_Through_the_Prism&oldid=18744|"A View Through the Prism"], [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Tributes_to_Norris_Church_Mailer/Lip_Liner|"Lip Liner"], and [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/The_Living_Room_Show#|"The Living Room Show"] in Volume 5. They are ready for your review. Thank you!—[[User:ADavis|ADavis]] ([[User talk:ADavis|talk]]) 12:31, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|ADavis}} great work. Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:26, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Submission notification sent 29 March ==

@grlucas

Dr. Lucas - I sent a Talk Page notification that I had completed the page I remediated on 29 March. The table indicates I haven't done anything yet. I sent it from the Talk Page from the article site. I don't see a response from that notification, but I had received one from you earlier in the process.
I don't understand what happened.

[[User:LogansPop22|LogansPop22]] ([[User talk:LogansPop22|talk]]) 14:54, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|LogansPop22}} sorry if I missed that. [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Hemingway and Women at the Front: Blowing Bridges in The Fifth Column, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Other Works|this article]], right? It's looking great, though all the parenthetical citations must be converted to footnotes using {{tl|sfn}} and some of the author names in your notes should use {{tl|harvtxt}}. I added the "citations" section for you. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:39, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law ==

@Grlucas, I have made some additional edits to this [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Making_Masculinity_and_Unmaking_Jewishness:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Voice_in_Wild_90_and_Beyond_the_Law article] in Volume 5 by correcting most of the citations. There are 2 that still do not work, but I think that is because the sources are incomplete.

[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 21:16, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| TPoole}} Looking really good, and this is a complicated one. A couple of things: no spaces or line breaks before or after {{tl|pg}}; I removed the spaces before {{tl|sfn}}, but you might want to check them; there are some typos, like missing spaces before some parentheses; no footnotes should appear in the notes section: use {{tl|harvtxt}} instead. And all the red errors at the bottom need to be cleared up. Great work so far! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:00, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Red Error-Gone ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}I have deleted all the sfn's and the red error is gone. I don't know why I didn't think about this days ago.

[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe|Gladstein-Monroe]]

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 23:07, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|MerAtticus}} getting closer. A few things: you should use <code>|author-mask=1</code> for repeated author names in your works cited; all parenthetical citations need to be replaced with footnotes using {{tl|sfn}}; must punctuation in your sources need to be removed as the templates do that for you; and you need to use {{tl|harvtxt}} for citations in your endnotes. Also, letters and films have their own templates. I did a couple of these for you as examples. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:14, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Remembering Norris" Tribute Remediation ==

Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Remembering Norris|"Remembering Norris"]] by Margo Howard.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:20, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} excellent! Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:35, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

== Norman Mailer: From Orgone Accumulator to Cancer Protection for Schizophrenics ==

Dr. Lucas,

The following article is ready for your review:
https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer:_From_Orgone_Accumulator_to_Cancer_Protection_for_Schizophrenics

I was unable to find the correct format for the first works cited entry under Mailer. It is a reprint of a magazine article. Thank you. [[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 16:28, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} you are a master remediator! Thank you for going above and beyond. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:44, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

==Tolls of War: Mailerian Sub-Texts in For Whom the Bell Tolls, Trust & Sparring with Norman==
Dr. Lucas, these were some of the smaller ones, so I went ahead and knocked them out. They are ready for review: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Sparring with Norman|Sparring with Norman]], [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Trust|Trust]], and [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tolls of War: Mailerian Sub-Texts in For Whom the Bell Tolls|Tolls of War: Mailerian Sub-Texts in For Whom the Bell Tolls]]. —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 10:27, 13 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Kamyers}} all excellent—above and beyond! Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:56, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing'' ==

Hi everyone,
I am currently helping with the article, [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Death,_Art,_and_the_Disturbing:_Hemingway_and_Mailer_and_the_Art_of_Writing Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing]. It still has a good bit to go, if anyone wants to help out.
—[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 5:17 PM, 13 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|CVinson}} thanks! I added the author info. I'm not sure many will see your request; you might want to post it on the forum. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 14:56, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Thank you for adding the author information and I have posted the request in the forum. Thank you! —[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:CVinson|talk]]) 6:53 PM, 14 April 2025 (EDT)

== Mimi and Mercer ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have corrected the Mimi Gladstein [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Piling On: Norman Mailer’s Utilization of Marilyn Monroe]] and removed all the red errors. I also have finishe the Erin Mercer article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Automatons and the Atomic Abyss: The Naked and the Dead]], except the ''The Naked and the Dead'' in the display title. An error occured.
[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 19:26, 13 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} good work. There should be no footnotes in the endnotes, please. Since this is the only thing to correct, I have removed the banner, but please let me know when you made that final correction. Thanks! (I will respond about your second article shortly.) —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 14:59, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} your second article looks good. Could you use the [[w:Template:Cite interview|Template:Cite interview]] for interviews. I did one for you. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 16:33, 14 April 2025 (EDT)

== Through the Lens of the Beatniks Remediation ==

Hello, Dr. Lucas! I've completed the remediation of [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Through_the_Lens_of_the_Beatniks:_Norman_Mailer_and_Modern_American_Man’s_Quest_for_Self-Realization#CITEREFNaked1992|Through the Lens of the Beatniks]]. I wasn't able to get the letter citations exactly how I thought they should be. If there's anything I'm missing, please let me know! Thanks! [[User:Maggiemrogers|Maggiemrogers]] ([[User talk:Maggiemrogers|talk]]) 10:09, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Maggiemrogers}} got it! It looks great. I made some format changes, but you did a great job! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 15:58, 14 April 2025 (EDT)

== Finish Mimi ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}

I have made the final edit to Mimi and removed the footnotes from the endnotes. [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe]] [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 15:50, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} you removed all the citations. Only '''footnotes''' need to be removed, but citations need to stay. I did the first note for you (now erased, but you can see it in the history) so you could see how it was done. You can also see [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer|this one]]. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 16:52, 14 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed? All You Need is Glove ==

Hi Dr. Lucas, I believe the book review, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/All_You_Need_is_Glove|All You Need is Glove]] is done and ready for review! [[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 19:10, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Hobbitonya}} awesome work! Banner removed, and many thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:08, 16 April 2025 (EDT)

== Harv and Sfn no-target ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I changed the citations in the article to interview and I tried a few things to get rid of the Harv and Sfn no-target with little luck. [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Automatons_and_the_Atomic_Abyss:_The_Naked_and_the_Dead]]
[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:04, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} this was because your interviews had no dates. Most are from Lennon's book, published in 1988. I added the dates to the citations, but the sfn footnotes need to be fixed to correspond with those. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:24, 16 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} OK, between your fixes and my little tweaks, this one is finished! Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:50, 17 April 2025 (EDT)

== Erros fixed ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have fixed all citation errors in both articles and added the harvtxt. Atomic Abyss still has the Pages using duplicate arguments in template calls error.
[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Automatons_and_the_Atomic_Abyss:_The_Naked_and_the_Dead]]
:{{Reply to|MerAtticus}} see above. These still need fixing. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:35, 16 April 2025 (EDT)

[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe]]
:{{Reply to|MerAtticus}} this one looks great! Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:35, 16 April 2025 (EDT)

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 08:23, 15 April 2025 (EDT)

== completed: Advertisements for Others ==

Thanks to some classmates helping with the finishing touches, my second article should be ready. [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Advertisements_for_Others:_The_Blurbs_of_Norman_Mailer|Advertisements for Others.]]
--[[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 19:24, 17 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to| NrmMGA5108}} received, and thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:15, 18 April 2025 (EDT)

== Two Poems Vol 4 Ready? ==

Hi Dr. Lucas! I think these two poems are ready for review: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/The Boxer in the Park|The Boxer in the Park]] and Norman Mailer and [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer_and_Ernest_Hemingway_Do_Not_Box_in_Heaven|Ernest Hemingway Do Not Box in Heaven]]. The second on says the display title is wrong, but again, I don't know what I am missing there. Thank you![[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 09:05, 18 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Hobbitonya}} excellent! Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:56, 18 April 2025 (EDT)

== A Dialogue Essay on Mailer and Hemingway ==

Hey,

I see that [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/A Dialogue Essay on Mailer and Hemingway|A Dialogue Essay on Mailer and Hemingway]] is missing text. Can you email me a copy or link it as a reply, so I can remediate this article. [[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 09:44, 18 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| APKnight25}} you may download both volumes’ PDFs on the [https://forum.grlucas.net/t/project-mailer-assignments-remediation-project/88/3?u=grlucas forum]. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:40, 18 April 2025 (EDT)

== Almost complete ==

@grlucas
I've made a ton of progress.
The only thing I have left is going through all of the links to do away with harvtxt and sfn target error and an error for extra text in the author section. I fixed the error about using an "en" dash between years.
I'll still be working on it until tomorrow night, but please take a look: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Hemingway_and_Women_at_the_Front:_Blowing_Bridges_in_The_Fifth_Column,_For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls,_and_Other_Works

@grlucas
I’ve gotten rid of the second of three error messages. Still looking for the harvtxt sfn target error.
[[User:LogansPop22|LogansPop22]] ([[User talk:LogansPop22|talk]]) 14:45, 20 April 2025 (EDT)

== Articles complete ==

@grlucas
I have also made a lot of progress with my articles and luckily received a last minute assit from a few of my class mates. I beleive both volumes to be complete: Vol 4: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer,_Hemingway,_and_the_%E2%80%9CReds%E2%80%9D (Which I believe has already been submitted) and Volume 5: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Making_Masculinity_and_Unmaking_Jewishness:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Voice_in_Wild_90_and_Beyond_the_Law (I just received the final error correction from a fellow student.

I also started working on this Vol 4 article once I got back into the system: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Style,_Politics,_and_Hemingway%27s_Spanish_Civil_War_Dispatches in my sandbox https://projectmailer.net/pm/User:KWatson/sandbox but another user has already completed it.

Please review my articles and advise what else is needed from me. Thank you [[User:KWatson|KWatson]] ([[User talk:KWatson|talk]]) 15:37, 19 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| KWatson}} OK, I already checked the [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and the “Reds”|Peppard article]]. For [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law|the Cohen]], the notes are still not quite right. Citations must be logically inserted. Instead of <blockquote>Mary V. Dearborn writes that Mailer picked up Yiddish at home from his parents, “enough so that many years later, in Germany, he was able to ask for directions in this language and be understood.” {{harvtxt|Dearborn|1999|p=14}}</blockquote> it should be <blockquote>Mary V. {{harvtxt|Dearborn|1999|p=14}} writes that Mailer picked up Yiddish at home from his parents, “enough so that many years later, in Germany, he was able to ask for directions in this language and be understood.” </blockquote> See the difference? Please be meticulous on these. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:57, 20 April 2025 (EDT)

== Additional edits ==

Hello! I reformatted all in text citations, did some editing, and added page numbers to [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing|Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing]]- could you please take a look at the updated page and see if there's anything additional that it needs?

I was also wondering: on this page, I had also recieved confirmation from you that my [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/The American Civil War in The Naked and the Dead and Across the River and Into the Trees|originally assigned article]] was complete, and the banner could be removed. However, it is still showing as an X on the page, and I am unable to find the comment from you! Could you please clarify if anything needs to be fixed? Thanks so much!
[[User:KaraCroissant|KaraCroissant]] ([[User talk:KaraCroissant|talk]]) 16:25, 19 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| KaraCroissant}} good! I was making quite a few corrections on “[[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing|Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing]],” but I stopped, figuring you might want to finish it. Put footnotes directly after the quotations, not all at the end of sentences. No spaces or line breaks before or after {{tl|pg}}. Use <code>|author-mask=1</code> with repeated author names in works cited entries, titles of books must be italicized like they are in the original text, etc. Thanks. After a few fixes, I removed the banner for the [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/The American Civil War in The Naked and the Dead and Across the River and Into the Trees|Meredith article]]. Well done. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:20, 20 April 2025 (EDT)

== Civil War..Dispatched. ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}

I believe the Hemingway's Spanish Civil War is complete except the harvtext were not working. [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Style,_Politics,_and_Hemingway's_Spanish_Civil_War_Dispatches]]
[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 17:37, 19 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} I made many small corrections. Please view them in the history and continue in the same way. This one just needs a bit more attention. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:33, 20 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation, Vol. 4 & 5 ==

For your review,

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norris_Church_Mailer:_An_Artist_from_Arkansas

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Imagining_Evil:_The_Sardonic_Narrator_of_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Last_Novel (Wasn't sure whether or not to add the dinkus)

[[User:Wverna|Wverna]] ([[User talk:Wverna|talk]]) 11:15, 20 April 2025 (EDT)

== Hemingway ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}} I revised early this morning and I have gone back through it this afternoon. Hopefully it looks okay. Any ciations in the notes at this point is beyond my understanding of the topic. [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Style,_Politics,_and_Hemingway's_Spanish_Civil_War_Dispatches]]

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 14:11, 20 April 2025 (EDT)

== Combat ==
Hello
For your review [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/What_Norman_Mailer_Taught_Me_about_Combat|What Norman Mailer Taught Me about Combat].
Completed by me and @Flowersbloom
[[User:Tbara4554|Tbara4554]] ([[User talk:Tbara4554|talk]]) 18:45, 20 April 2025 (EDT)

== Article Completed ==

Hi Dr. Lucas - I have finished the article [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/“A_Noble_Pursuit”:_The_Armies_of_the_Night_as_Outside_Agitator|“A Noble Pursuit”: The Armies of the Night as Outside Agitator]]. Please let me know if any changes are needed. Thanks!--[[User:Chelsey.brantley|Chelsey.brantley]] ([[User talk:Chelsey.brantley|talk]]) 19:13, 20 April 2025 (EDT)

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/“A Noble Pursuit”: The Armies of the Night as Outside Agitator

2025-04-20T23:09:49Z

Chelsey.brantley: Split citations into 3 columns; works cited into 2 columns

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{Byline|last=Westaway|first=Katharine|url=https://prmlr.us/mr07dick|abstract=One of the achievements of ''The Armies of the Night'' is that Norman Mailer is able to designate the marchers as patriots, a far cry from the criticism that labeled them “draft dodgers,” “communists,” and “rabble rousers.” Mailer aligns the march itself with America’s long tradition of ostensibly just and triumphant empire-building conflict. He describes the March on the Pentagon as a rite of passage and connects this to a collection of American moments that could be understood as similar rites of passage.}}

{{dc|dc=O|n a weekend in October of 1967,}} tens of thousands of demonstrators
amassed in Washington DC to protest the war in Vietnam. Intending ''The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History'' (1968) to record and commemorate this eventful weekend, Norman Mailer enlarged the march on the Pentagon’s meaning, working as a novelist to make it more
than a four-day set of tremors in the nation’s capital. Some consider the
march a watershed moment, “the first in a chain of events that led to Lyndon
Johnson’s decision . . . to deescalate in Vietnam."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=70}} Mailer’s
nonfiction novel carefully examines this defining event of American history.
Through Mailer’s dual role as a demonstrator and narrator, readers are provided
a rich witness to the many obstacles that were set before marchers in the form of a biased media and government officials opposed to the peace
movement, including the military and police whose physical abuse is featured in the novel.

''Armies'' is also concerned with a sweeping view of American culture ''vis-à-vis'' the march, for this is a “literary project . . . radically committed to a
rendering of the American reality”,{{sfn|Scott|1973|p=18}} and ''Armies'' becomes Mailer’s
attempt to expand upon the march’s implications for the national character.
When ''Armies'' was published, the country was divided over the war in Vietnam; according to a 1967 Gallup poll, when asked whether “the U.S. made a mistake sending troops to Vietnam” forty-six percent said yes while almost an equal amount, forty-four percent, answered no.{{sfn|Gallup|1972|p=2087}} Mailer addresses
the division over the war and also the disparaging of anti-war {{pg|483|484}}
protestors in the mainstream press which created a gulf between mainstream America and the anti-war movement: “from late 1967 into 1968 when Mailer wrote this book, open season on the ‘hippie’ had been tacitly declared."{{sfn|MacFarlane|2007|p=131}} Mailer works to familiarize the populace with these voices of
dissent and to humanize them. The cultural clashes Mailer depicts epitomize the volatility of the U.S. at that moment, the rips in the social fabric that were becoming obvious during the escalation of the Vietnam War.

I will also consider how this novel might have acted as a catalyst for activism
for some contemporary readers and how it worked to coalesce support for the anti-war movement, addressing those Americans who were either unsympathetic towards or even appalled by the anti-war protesters
and challenging readers to see the efficacy and patriotism of the marchers’ cause. It is difficult to gauge the novel’s effectiveness on this front, but I will
consider media coverage and popular reaction to the marchers and to the
book itself. It is in the novelistic form that Mailer shares this moment in history,
and he has said that the reading of novels “is a noble pursuit, that ideally
it profoundly changes the ways in which people perceive their
experience."{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=133}} Mailer understood the great possibility of his
novel to effect change and the opportunity he had to shape readers’ understanding
of what it meant to protest the war in Vietnam.

The political divide was so great in America in the late 1960s that Mailer may have felt obliged to explain one faction to another, to use as a didactic
tool; he was teaching about a counterculture, from which many Americans
were insulated. Scott MacFarlane measures the social turmoil of the times “at a level unseen since the Civil War. The book reading public was clamoring for insight into what was happening on the streets of America."{{sfn|MacFarlane|2007|p=133}} ''Armies'' was a new window into the anti-war movement. The mainstream
media kept Americans in the dark about the anti-war movement. Readers
were witness to Mailer’s own perspective of the counterculture which was not always exhortative: “It was the children in whom Mailer had some hope, a gloomy hope. These mad middle-class children with their lobotomies from
sin, their nihilistic embezzlement of all middle-class moral funds, their innocence,
their lust for apocalypse, their unbelievable indifference to waste."{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=44}} Mailer does not form saints out of the anti-war camp, and
one could not accuse Mailer of being an outright defender of the counterculture.
But through his intimate sketches of the activists and his own experience
as a fellow marcher, we do see images of greatness, of self-sacrifice and {{pg|484|485}}
patriotism. Most important, Mailer, as narrator/protagonist, gives Americans
outside the march a sense of what it was to be a demonstrator.

One of Mailer’s main tasks as an author is to acquaint his readers with the
character of the marchers themselves, so a primary concern of ''Armies'' is media bias as it affected the American public’s sentiments about the acts of resistance happening all around them. But the mainstream press was hawkish:
before the Tet Offensive in January of 1968, “not a single major newspaper
or television network call[ed] for the end to the war."{{sfn|Streitmatter|2001|p=197}} In fact, the mainstream media plainly opposed the anti-war effort “in the heady days early in the war when American correspondents doubled as government handmaidens, they openly condemned anti-war protesters as traitors."{{sfn|Streitmatter|1997|p=201}} This was the atmosphere in which
Mailer attempted to tell a moving tale of the anti-war movement.

Mailer renounces conventional journalism; he doesn’t trust the media to analyze the anti-war movement fairly. Media studies of the time show that
“throughout [the] various stages of escalating involvement, mainstream
American journalists supported the effort, serving as exuberant cheerleaders
for the military."{{sfn|Streitmatter|2001|p=184}} Mailer frequently points out
the unfair coverage that the press gave to the actions of the demonstrators
and how "[e]mphasis was put on every rock thrown, and a count was made of the windows broken. (There were, however, only a few.) But there was no
specific mention of The Wedge [a brutal crowd control technique, which resulted
in beating of the marchers]. Indeed, stories [of police brutality]
quickly disappeared."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=313-14}} This becomes evident as Mailer distinguishes
the reporting of mainstream press from that of the alternative
press. The alternative press (such as the ''Catholic Worker'', ''I.F. Stone’s Weekly,
''National Guardian'', and ''Ramparts'') was critical of the war going back in some
cases to the 1950s when troops were first deployed to Vietnam.{{sfn|Streitmatter|2001|p=184}}

One of the most damning charges in the book is the brutality perpetrated
against the marchers, who were for the most part peacefully protesting; some
protestors were “clubbed until they were broken and bloody."{{sfn|Zaroulis|Sullivan|1984|p=138}} The abuse was amplified by the fact that it often went unreported.
For the reports of police violence, Mailer relies upon outside sources
because he had been arrested early in the demonstration before most of the
violence occurred. Yet he gains credibility when integrating outside witnesses
and reportage into a book that was mostly reported from his standpoint,{{pg|485|486}}
and these external sources may have lent more authority to the charge that
protesters were abused. For any journalist there was difficulty in covering
something as large as the march on the Pentagon “because of the extensive
terrain in question and the rapid movements of the protestors and soldiers."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=72}} Acting as a novelist-journalist, Mailer collects varied media accounts
of the march and weaves them into the narrative; here he features
one Leftist perspective of the march, identifying the witness as “Harvey
Mayes of the English Department at Hunter”:
<blockquote>One soldier spilled the water from his canteen on the ground in order to add to the discomfort of the female demonstrator at his feet. She cursed him—understandably, I think—and shifted her body. She lost her balance and her shoulder hit the rifle at the soldier’s side. He raised the rifle, and with its butt, came down hard on the girl’s leg. The girl tried to move back but was not fast enough to avoid the billy-club of a soldier in the second row of the troops. At least four times that soldier hit her with all his force.{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=303}}</blockquote>
Mailer was obliged to portray the graphic scenes from the march which were missing in many media reports. Perhaps the stories of abuse were reported on more by the Left media because the Left journalists were among the protestors, down in the tussle, while mainstream reporters observed from a safe
distance, avoiding a potential encounter with violent police.

Mailer also gave accounts of “the [mainstream] press [who were], in the
aftermath, antagonistic to the March” and so included passages of an article from the ''New York Times'' which stated that “[i]t is difficult to report publicly the ugly and vulgar provocation of many of the militants. They spat on some
of the soldiers in the front line at the Pentagon and goaded them with the most vicious personal slander. . . . [M]any officials here are surprised that
there was not much more violence."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=313}} Notice that the ''Times'' does not mention any specific violence of the MPs. Numerous commentators condemned ''not'' the beatings meted out to the demonstrators, but the protest
itself; David Brinkley called it a “coarse, vulgar episode."{{sfn|Wells|1994|p=202–3}} However,
Maurice Isserman, one marcher, remembers the marchers for the most part as peaceful, remaining “pretty true to Gandhian principles."{{sfn|Isserman|2007|p=B15}}

In looking beyond Mailer’s collection of media accounts of the march, it{{pg|486|487}}

is clear that he wasn’t exaggerating the bias against anti-war activists. The
''New York Times'' reported that Robert McNamara felt his soldiers showed “restraint . . . under provocation,"{{sfn|Reston|1967|p=1}} and in one article the protesters
were referred to as “scum of the universe”{{sfn|Roberts|1967|p=45}}; another report called the demonstration “mass paranoia . . . elicit[ing] a great deal of foolishness."{{sfn|Baker|1967|p=45}} What the press wrote about the protestors was not always so disparaging, but rarely was the message of the marchers given much time, and this sort of mainstream coverage was the only information readily
available to the general public about the anti-war movement. Some of the first reports of the march on and the siege of the Pentagon were missing reports of police violence because the reporters went home late Saturday
night before the police began employing more militant tactics. But on Monday in another story of the march the ''New York Times'' still ignored “the bloody military sweep of early Sunday morning;” the ''Washington Post''’s Monday coverage was similar in that it “continued to emphasize the violence
of the protestors, not the defenders of the Pentagon."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=76, 78}} ''Time'' came out with its story a few days after the march on October 27 in which they marginalized the protestors as “left-wing radicals, hippies, acid
heads, and people with painted faces in bizarre costumes” while at the same time “applaud[ing] the government for its restraint."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=79–80}}

Mailer is unwilling to let the picture that the mainstream press drew of demonstrators become the only permanent record, and“he scolded the press for their lies, and their misrepresentation, for their guilt in creating a psychology over the last twenty years in the average American which made wars like Vietnam possible."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=93}} Mailer understands that the press is pivotal in a nation’s critique of its culture and policies, and he takes the press to task for their failure to cultivate an informed public. Eventually, Mailer’s ''Armies'' would stand with media accounts as a record of the event. Before ''Armies'' was published as a book in 1968, it appeared in periodicals (almost the entire issues of ''Harper’s'' and ''Commentary'' were given to this story). So
Mailer responded to the mass media’s “forest of inaccuracy” first in popular periodicals and then in book form. According to Dick Fontaine, a British filmmaker who was filming a documentary of Mailer over the weekend of
the march, “Norman remembered, with frightening accuracy, minutes and minutes, pages and pages, of the dialogues he was having with the others, let alone, of course, the brilliant descriptions of time, place and mood. . . . His
memory and interpretations of . . . [these events] are truly breathtaking.”{{pg|487|488}}

This speaks well of Mailer’s journalistic sensibilities and his hope to avoid a
forest of inaccuracies himself. To this end, it is important to recall that ''Armies''
won a Polk Award for excellence in journalism.

One of the achievements of ''Armies'' is that in it Mailer is able to designate the marchers as patriots, a far cry from the criticism that labeled them “draft
dodgers,” “communists,” and “rabble rousers.” In contrast, Mailer describes draft resisters as moral and courageous: “by handing in draft cards, these
young men were committing their future either to prison, emigration, frustration,
or at best, years where everything must be unknown, and that spoke
of a readiness to take moral leaps . . . [and a] faith in one’s ability to react with
grace."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=88}} Mailer recasts draft dodgers as draft resisters, those willing to risk their lives for peace rather than war. Furthermore, Mailer aligns the march itself with America’s long tradition of ostensibly just and triumphant empire-building conflict. He describes the March on the Pentagon as a rite of passage and connects this to a collection of American moments that could be understood as similar rites of passage, for “each generation
of Americans had forged their own rite, in the forest of the Alleghenies and the Adirondacks, at Valley Forge, at New Orleans in 1812, with Rogers and Clark or at Sutter’s Mill, at Gettysburg, the Alamo, the Klondike, the Argonne, Normandy, Pusan."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=308}} Such a comparison implies that without undergoing such crises the U.S. would not have become a sovereign republic, and so the March on the Pentagon is figured as another historic challenge for the country. This lofty rhetoric is meant to stir a reader’s patriotic sympathies, and Mailer is determined that his audience will see the marchers not as subversives but as patriots within the traditions of American democracy.

Mailer understood that “to affect consciousness is thus to shape power” and that his words were shaping people’s perception of the anti-war movement.
Even if his readers were persuaded to believe in a peaceful resolution to the Vietnam War, what would these readers do with this new consciousness,
a consciousness which was “itself a central ingredient in power”{{sfn|Miller|1990|p=394}}? It is difficult to measure how readers enact their power, but we can watch how Mailer enacts his own. He undertakes his own civil disobedience, getting arrested in hopes of gaining publicity and offering credence to the
cause of the march, and he understands that his symbolic action must be captured by the press to multiply its effect. When writing the story of ''Armies'', Mailer tracks his own movement from critic to supporter to war protester to{{pg|488|489}}

prisoner of conscience, and we see that he “feels the claims of imagination
as urgently as the claims of action,"{{sfn|Behar|1970|p=262}} and so he must both examine and act.

''Armies'' represents, for Mailer, a test of his moral strength, an examination of whether Mailer could stand behind his highest moral principles. The story of ''Armies'' offers a way for Mailer to put his philosophy into action and to answer the question, Are you willing to put your life on the line? David Wyatt calls Mailer “a man so obsessed by courage,” which is a persistent theme in Mailer’s famous essay “The White Negro” (1957).{{sfn|Wyatt|2008|p=318}} In many ways ''Armies'' is tied to all of Mailer’s preceding writing. The most obvious connection is to ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' (1967), but the themes and challenges of ''Armies'' are also indebted to ''Cannibals and Christians'' (1966) and ''The Presidential Papers'' (1963). These books variously tested the warrior in Mailer. Even his first book, ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948), plays a role in the conception of ''Armies''. Mary Dearborn claims that ''Armies'' is a recapitulation of his first novel bringing up questions of “confrontation with and the reaction to authority."{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=244}} In ''Armies'', Mailer’s critique of structures of power and his own civil disobedience stands in clear defiance of authoritarian establishments, the same authoritarian establishments which thwarted characters in his previous texts. Mailer’s working out of his own demons in this
journey from author to activist was also meant to engage the hearts and minds of his readers in the important business of opening their eyes to the truth about the war in Vietnam. But it is not just a story about Mailer or the many Mailer characters; Mailer serves as an entry to the predicament of the war in Vietnam and a people’s various ways to protest it.

Mailer admits early in the story his growing belief that his own writing about the Vietnam War is not enough, that “no project had seemed to cost
him enough,” for his writing was one thing, but action was another. And by simply writing about the Vietnam War “he had been suffering more and more in the past few years from the private conviction that he was getting a
little soft, a hint curdled."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=70–1}} This may have served as a barb at
his audience of readers, among whom surely numbered many armchair revolutionaries.
To keep from getting soft and to resist being contented with a
writer’s perspective, he had to move into action himself. He had to actually
take part in the demonstrations, to be physically, not just ideologically in
opposition to the war, but we are not meant to concentrate solely on Mailer’s own struggle. Rather, from his own story of activism he may bring about in {{pg|489|490}}

his readers a new understanding that through the act of reading one becomes
aware, but not yet ''involved'' in a cause. Readers might appreciate that having their consciousness raised was not the same as protesting the war in
their own communities, not at all the same as stepping out into the streets
to form a human protest. One had to move from words to action, from page to protest.

Mailer asks serious questions of his readers, as Alfred Kazin points out, describing him as the first “leading American peacenik and resister addressing urgent questions to his ‘army’—Are we good enough? How can we overcome
the ‘mediocrity of the middle-class middle-aged masses of the Left?’
The general shoddiness of American standards just now? The tendency of authorities to lie?”{{sfn|Kazin|1968|p=BR 1}} Mailer artfully places such questions within the
framework of a narrative, addressed not only to fellow peaceniks but also to
a popular readership. It was important that this novel travel beyond the Left community, and it did. Indeed, ''Armies'' “reestablished Mailer with a wide audience"{{sfn|Whalen-Bridge|2003|p=217}} and won both the Pulitzer Prize for General
Nonfiction and the National Book Award. And it was gaining a popular audience
(a readership made up of more than those on the Left) for this topic
that was a challenge for Mailer: “walking the parapet between the intellectual
and the popular, and Mailer with his dream of making ‘a revolution in
the consciousness of our time’ is too ambitious to settle for a minority ‘art’
audience."{{sfn|Radford|1983|p=230}} Mailer was ambitious enough to take on the challenge
of telling a story that those within the anti-war movement would rally
around and those outside would give a fair hearing.

The novel, first in serial and then in book form, was meant to prod readers to action. In fact, it is specifically the expansiveness of the novel genre that Mailer finds useful toward a moral end. Mailer understood the great
potential of the genre. In one interview he contends that “art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people. In particular,
I think the novel is at its best the most moral of the art forms because
it’s the most immediate, the most overbearing . . . It is the most
inescapable."{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=384}} Did Mailer’s readers find his story
inescapable, and if so, were they catalyzed to protest the war themselves? The
answer cannot easily be quantified. We can, however, study the way in which Norman Mailer tried to activate readers. Critics picked up on this hunger
of Mailer’s to make change, his “extra-literary hunger for things to change
and change now, in palpable ways rather than in the imaginary, alternative{{pg|490|491}}

ways in which most artist-novelists deal."{{sfn|Gilman|1968|p=27}} This book is not only
a testimony of civil disobedience but also a story which aims to engender civil disobedience in the reader.

Wherever readers stood on the political continuum, ''Armies'' invites readers
to justify events in the book with their real lives; it allows for “[r]eading
history over the edge of text,” which is a combination of “close reading and
analysis that allow us to get ‘inside’ the narrative, while at the same time we
understand that the narrators and subjects of nonfiction . . . live ‘outside’ the
narrative as well."{{sfn|Lehman|1997|p=3}} This makes for an intense reading experience,
especially if the novelist like Mailer uses his skills to capture an already fascinating
or contentious event. One other factor that might have turned contemporary
readers into implicated readers was the timeliness of the book’s
release: the march was more than mere history it was a recent event when the book was published just seven months after the event—and the controversy
over Vietnam still raged on.

In a nonfiction novel such as ''Armies''the story can take on very real manifestations,
which could lead to political action on the part of readers. A
reader could take measure of his or her own (in)action regarding the war
and choose to act out against the war. Such action is difficult to trace, but in
the case of ''Armies'', Rubin claims the novel “became the Bible of the movement”{{sfn|Manso|1985|p=461}}; Dearborn suggests that “young leftists found it an astute
analysis and were impressed by the passion Mailer brought to the work."{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=246}} However, Michael Albert and Noam Chomsky, both major figures in
the anti-war movement, didn’t feel that it made much of an impact within
the movement. Albert recalls “honestly, I doubt if anyone I knew or virtually
anyone in the movement read it, even I didn’t. My guess would be it had [a]
very very modest impact . . . and virtually none inside the movement per
se.” While it is unclear whether it affected those within the movement, it is also difficult to tell how it affected readers just becoming acquainted with the
peace movement. Dearborn indicates that those outside the movement were
touched by the novel: “across the political spectrum, readers who watched
the student movement with varying degrees of approval or censure were
made to understand that what was going on in the streets . . . was a real phenomenon
that had to be taken extremely seriously."{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=246}} Furthermore, the
Pulitzer and National Book Award, which were because of the novel, are a
sort of establishment seals of approval—proof that it had reached middle
America. Contemporary reviewers were generous with their praise. The
{{pg|491|492}}

''London Magazine'' named him “the best living writer of English prose."{{sfn|Bergonzi|1968|p=100}} Others saw ''Armies'' saw as a monumental book, “a literary act
whose significance is certain to grow."{{sfn|Gilman|1968|p=27}} One way the book could
live on was through the reactions of its readers.

Not only was ''Armies'' about politics, but the novel stood as a statement of
the relationship between literature and politics. To ignore politics, for the novelist, is an error. Mailer must speak politically, for “the separation of the
literary and political horizons is a mute acceptance of the structures through
which power is exercised."{{sfn|Schueller|1992|p=127}} Whether his novel convinced one
single person to join the anti-war cause or not, it was a necessary testimony. Simply by representing the happenings of the anti-war movement in narrative
form, Mailer made a new current in American politics. Perhaps Mailer
understood the inescapability of politics, for as an activist author he could
not “dissociate himself from the social contexts through which he speaks."{{sfn|Schueller|1992|p=125}} His story would be null without its complex entanglement with real political struggle.

A contemporary review of ''Armies'' in ''The Nation'' called it “a permanent contribution to our literature—a unique testimony to literary responsiveness and responsibility”{{sfn|Trachtenberg|1968|p=702}}; certainly, Mailer was responding to
important political phenomena that had not received sustained literary attention.
His writing about the rifts within the tumultuous New Left, the division
between Americans for and against the war, and the response of
government and the press to the anti-war movement did delineate important
political issues that needed to be aired. Mailer did not shy away from critique of the government or the media or of himself in order to tell the story of those in the anti-war movement.

Mailer’s novel represents a catalyst for social change through its introduction
of an anti-war subculture to a popular audience. Mailer speaks candidly
about his intentions: “I was trying to bring a consciousness to America
about the war in Vietnam. . . . I think the effect of the book was to make resistance to the war in Vietnam a little more human to people who were still supporting the war. So, yes, I think the book did have a political effect. Maybe it tended to strengthen the side opposed to the war in Vietnam."{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=220}} Jason Epstein recalls ''Armies'' as a book “meant to rally or produce a political reaction”{{sfn|Manso|1985|p=470}}; a strong argument can be made for the fact that Mailer meant to catalyze his readers. He attested to the disorganization
and dissension within the anti-war camp, but more vigorously{{pg|492|493}}
showed the misrepresentation, defamation, and even the physical denigration
of the activists. His argument for peace in Vietnam gained stature because he was a bona fide activist for the cause, facing arrest to further the significance of his protest. He was there, present at the march, and authenticated his action by telling the story of the march. ''The Armies of the Night'' exists as a testament to the anti-war movement and to the efficacy of civil disobedience.

===Citations===
{{reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{citation
| last = Albert
| first = Michael
| title = A Referral from Noam Chomsky
| date = 10 November 2009
| publisher = Message to Katharine Westaway. E-mail.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Baker
| first = Russell
| title = Observer: Dove Antics
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 24 October 1967
| page = 45
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Behar
| first = Jack
| title = History and Fiction
| journal = NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction
| volume = 3
| issue = 3
| year = 1970
| pages = 260–265
| ref = harv
}}
*{{cite magazine
| last = Bergonzi
| first = Bernard
| title = Selected Books
| magazine = London Magazine
| date = November 1968
| pages = 98–100
| quote = Rev. of ''Cannibals and Christians'' and ''Armies of the Night,'' by Norman Mailer.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Dearborn
| first = Mary V.
| title = Mailer: A Biography
| publisher = Houghton Mifflin
| location = Boston
| year = 1999
| ref = harv
}}
* {{citation
| last = Fontaine
| first = Dick
| title = Question for Dick Fontaine
| date = 1 April 2009
| publisher = Message to Katharine Westaway. E-mail.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| editor-last = Gallup
| editor-first = George Horace
| title = Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1935–1971
| volume = 3
| publisher = Random House
| location = New York
| year = 1972
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Gilman
| first = Richard
| title = What Mailer Has Done
| magazine = The New Republic
| date = 8 June 1968
| pages = 27–31
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Isserman
| first = Maurice
| title = The Flower and the Gun
| magazine = The Chronicle of Higher Education
| date = 19 October 2007
| pages = B14–B15
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Kazin
| first = Alfred
| title = The Trouble He’s Seen
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 5 May 1968
| page = BR1
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Lehman
| first = Daniel W.
| title = Matters of Fact: Reading Nonfiction over the Edge
| publisher = Ohio State UP
| location = Columbus
| year = 1997
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = MacFarlane
| first = Scott
| title = The Hippie Narrative: A Literary Perspective on the Counterculture
| publisher = McFarland
| location = Jefferson
| year = 2007
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Mailer
| first = Norman
| title = Advertisements for Myself
| publisher = G. P. Putnam’s Sons
| location = New York
| year = 1959
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Mailer
| first = Norman
| author-mask=1
| title = Existential Aesthetics: An Interview with Norman Mailer
| others = Interview by Laura Adams
| editor-last = Lennon
| editor-first = J. Michael
| book-title = Conversations with Norman Mailer
| publisher = UP of Mississippi
| location = Jackson
| year = 1988
| pages = 207–227
| quote = Rpt. of "Existential Aesthetics: An Interview with Norman Mailer." ''Partisan Review'' 42.2 (1975): 197–214.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Mailer
| first = Norman
| author-mask=1
| chapter = Prisoner of Success: An Interview with Paul Attanasio
| editor-last = Lennon
| editor-first = J. Michael
| title = Pieces and Pontifications
| publisher = Little, Brown & Company
| location = Boston
| year = 1982
| pages = 129–136
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Manso
| first = Peter
| title = Norman Mailer: His Life and Times
| publisher = Simon and Schuster
| location = New York
| year = 1985
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Miller
| first = Joshua
| title = No Success Like Failure: Existential Politics in Norman Mailer’s ''The Armies of the Night''
| journal = Polity
| volume = 22
| issue = 3
| year = 1990
| pages = 379–396
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Radford
| first = Jean
| chapter = Norman Mailer: The True Story of an American Writer
| editor-last = Gray
| editor-first = Richard
| title = American Fiction: New Readings
| publisher = Vision Press
| location = London
| year = 1983
| pages = 222–237
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Reston
| first = James
| title = Everyone is a Loser
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 23 October 1967
| page = 1
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Roberts
| first = Gene
| title = Wallace Derides War Protesters
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 29 October 1967
| page = 45
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Schueller
| first = Malini Johar
| title = The Politics of Voice: Liberalism and Social Criticism from Franklin to Kingston
| publisher = State University of New York Press
| location = Albany
| year = 1992
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Scott
| first = Nathan A.
| title = Three American Moralists: Mailer, Bellow, Trilling
| publisher = U of Notre Dame P
| location = Notre Dame
| year = 1973
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Small
| first = Melvin
| title = Covering Dissent: The Media and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement
| publisher = Rutgers UP
| location = New Brunswick
| year = 1994
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Streitmatter
| first = Rodger
| author-mask=1
| title = Mightier Than the Sword: How the News Media Have Shaped American History
| publisher = Westview
| location = Boulder
| year = 1997
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Streitmatter
| first = Rodger
| title = Voices of Revolution: The Dissident Press in America
| publisher = Columbia UP
| location = New York
| year = 2001
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Trachtenberg
| first = Alan
| title = Mailer on the Steps of the Pentagon
| magazine = The Nation
| date = 27 May 1968
| pages = 701–702
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Wells
| first = Tom
| title = The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam
| publisher = U of California P
| location = Berkeley
| year = 1994
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Whalen-Bridge
| first = John
| chapter = Norman Mailer
| editor-first = James R.
| editor-last = Giles
| editor2-first = Wanda H.
| editor2-last = Giles
| title = American Novelists Since World War II. Seventh Series
| series = Dictionary of Literary Biography
| volume = 278
| publisher = Gale Group
| location = New York
| year = 2003
| pages = 217–232
| quote = Vol. 278 of ''Dictionary of Literary Biography''. 357 vols. to date. 1978–.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Wyatt
| first = David
| title = Living Out the Sixties
| journal = The Hopkins Review
| volume = 1
| issue = 2
| year = 2008
| pages = 315–332
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last1 = Zaroulis
| first1 = Nancy
| last2 = Sullivan
| first2 = Gerald
| title = Who Spoke Up? American Protest Against the War in Vietnam 1963–1975
| publisher = Doubleday
| location = Garden City
| year = 1984
| ref = harv
}}
{{Refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:“A Noble Pursuit”: The Armies of the Night as Outside Agitator: }}
[[Category:Miscellany (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/“A Noble Pursuit”: The Armies of the Night as Outside Agitator

2025-04-20T23:06:44Z

Chelsey.brantley: Added "author-mask=1" to citations where needed

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{Byline|last=Westaway|first=Katharine|url=https://prmlr.us/mr07dick|abstract=One of the achievements of ''The Armies of the Night'' is that Norman Mailer is able to designate the marchers as patriots, a far cry from the criticism that labeled them “draft dodgers,” “communists,” and “rabble rousers.” Mailer aligns the march itself with America’s long tradition of ostensibly just and triumphant empire-building conflict. He describes the March on the Pentagon as a rite of passage and connects this to a collection of American moments that could be understood as similar rites of passage.}}

{{dc|dc=O|n a weekend in October of 1967,}} tens of thousands of demonstrators
amassed in Washington DC to protest the war in Vietnam. Intending ''The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History'' (1968) to record and commemorate this eventful weekend, Norman Mailer enlarged the march on the Pentagon’s meaning, working as a novelist to make it more
than a four-day set of tremors in the nation’s capital. Some consider the
march a watershed moment, “the first in a chain of events that led to Lyndon
Johnson’s decision . . . to deescalate in Vietnam."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=70}} Mailer’s
nonfiction novel carefully examines this defining event of American history.
Through Mailer’s dual role as a demonstrator and narrator, readers are provided
a rich witness to the many obstacles that were set before marchers in the form of a biased media and government officials opposed to the peace
movement, including the military and police whose physical abuse is featured in the novel.

''Armies'' is also concerned with a sweeping view of American culture ''vis-à-vis'' the march, for this is a “literary project . . . radically committed to a
rendering of the American reality”,{{sfn|Scott|1973|p=18}} and ''Armies'' becomes Mailer’s
attempt to expand upon the march’s implications for the national character.
When ''Armies'' was published, the country was divided over the war in Vietnam; according to a 1967 Gallup poll, when asked whether “the U.S. made a mistake sending troops to Vietnam” forty-six percent said yes while almost an equal amount, forty-four percent, answered no.{{sfn|Gallup|1972|p=2087}} Mailer addresses
the division over the war and also the disparaging of anti-war {{pg|483|484}}
protestors in the mainstream press which created a gulf between mainstream America and the anti-war movement: “from late 1967 into 1968 when Mailer wrote this book, open season on the ‘hippie’ had been tacitly declared."{{sfn|MacFarlane|2007|p=131}} Mailer works to familiarize the populace with these voices of
dissent and to humanize them. The cultural clashes Mailer depicts epitomize the volatility of the U.S. at that moment, the rips in the social fabric that were becoming obvious during the escalation of the Vietnam War.

I will also consider how this novel might have acted as a catalyst for activism
for some contemporary readers and how it worked to coalesce support for the anti-war movement, addressing those Americans who were either unsympathetic towards or even appalled by the anti-war protesters
and challenging readers to see the efficacy and patriotism of the marchers’ cause. It is difficult to gauge the novel’s effectiveness on this front, but I will
consider media coverage and popular reaction to the marchers and to the
book itself. It is in the novelistic form that Mailer shares this moment in history,
and he has said that the reading of novels “is a noble pursuit, that ideally
it profoundly changes the ways in which people perceive their
experience."{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=133}} Mailer understood the great possibility of his
novel to effect change and the opportunity he had to shape readers’ understanding
of what it meant to protest the war in Vietnam.

The political divide was so great in America in the late 1960s that Mailer may have felt obliged to explain one faction to another, to use as a didactic
tool; he was teaching about a counterculture, from which many Americans
were insulated. Scott MacFarlane measures the social turmoil of the times “at a level unseen since the Civil War. The book reading public was clamoring for insight into what was happening on the streets of America."{{sfn|MacFarlane|2007|p=133}} ''Armies'' was a new window into the anti-war movement. The mainstream
media kept Americans in the dark about the anti-war movement. Readers
were witness to Mailer’s own perspective of the counterculture which was not always exhortative: “It was the children in whom Mailer had some hope, a gloomy hope. These mad middle-class children with their lobotomies from
sin, their nihilistic embezzlement of all middle-class moral funds, their innocence,
their lust for apocalypse, their unbelievable indifference to waste."{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=44}} Mailer does not form saints out of the anti-war camp, and
one could not accuse Mailer of being an outright defender of the counterculture.
But through his intimate sketches of the activists and his own experience
as a fellow marcher, we do see images of greatness, of self-sacrifice and {{pg|484|485}}
patriotism. Most important, Mailer, as narrator/protagonist, gives Americans
outside the march a sense of what it was to be a demonstrator.

One of Mailer’s main tasks as an author is to acquaint his readers with the
character of the marchers themselves, so a primary concern of ''Armies'' is media bias as it affected the American public’s sentiments about the acts of resistance happening all around them. But the mainstream press was hawkish:
before the Tet Offensive in January of 1968, “not a single major newspaper
or television network call[ed] for the end to the war."{{sfn|Streitmatter|2001|p=197}} In fact, the mainstream media plainly opposed the anti-war effort “in the heady days early in the war when American correspondents doubled as government handmaidens, they openly condemned anti-war protesters as traitors."{{sfn|Streitmatter|1997|p=201}} This was the atmosphere in which
Mailer attempted to tell a moving tale of the anti-war movement.

Mailer renounces conventional journalism; he doesn’t trust the media to analyze the anti-war movement fairly. Media studies of the time show that
“throughout [the] various stages of escalating involvement, mainstream
American journalists supported the effort, serving as exuberant cheerleaders
for the military."{{sfn|Streitmatter|2001|p=184}} Mailer frequently points out
the unfair coverage that the press gave to the actions of the demonstrators
and how "[e]mphasis was put on every rock thrown, and a count was made of the windows broken. (There were, however, only a few.) But there was no
specific mention of The Wedge [a brutal crowd control technique, which resulted
in beating of the marchers]. Indeed, stories [of police brutality]
quickly disappeared."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=313-14}} This becomes evident as Mailer distinguishes
the reporting of mainstream press from that of the alternative
press. The alternative press (such as the ''Catholic Worker'', ''I.F. Stone’s Weekly,
''National Guardian'', and ''Ramparts'') was critical of the war going back in some
cases to the 1950s when troops were first deployed to Vietnam.{{sfn|Streitmatter|2001|p=184}}

One of the most damning charges in the book is the brutality perpetrated
against the marchers, who were for the most part peacefully protesting; some
protestors were “clubbed until they were broken and bloody."{{sfn|Zaroulis|Sullivan|1984|p=138}} The abuse was amplified by the fact that it often went unreported.
For the reports of police violence, Mailer relies upon outside sources
because he had been arrested early in the demonstration before most of the
violence occurred. Yet he gains credibility when integrating outside witnesses
and reportage into a book that was mostly reported from his standpoint,{{pg|485|486}}
and these external sources may have lent more authority to the charge that
protesters were abused. For any journalist there was difficulty in covering
something as large as the march on the Pentagon “because of the extensive
terrain in question and the rapid movements of the protestors and soldiers."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=72}} Acting as a novelist-journalist, Mailer collects varied media accounts
of the march and weaves them into the narrative; here he features
one Leftist perspective of the march, identifying the witness as “Harvey
Mayes of the English Department at Hunter”:
<blockquote>One soldier spilled the water from his canteen on the ground in order to add to the discomfort of the female demonstrator at his feet. She cursed him—understandably, I think—and shifted her body. She lost her balance and her shoulder hit the rifle at the soldier’s side. He raised the rifle, and with its butt, came down hard on the girl’s leg. The girl tried to move back but was not fast enough to avoid the billy-club of a soldier in the second row of the troops. At least four times that soldier hit her with all his force.{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=303}}</blockquote>
Mailer was obliged to portray the graphic scenes from the march which were missing in many media reports. Perhaps the stories of abuse were reported on more by the Left media because the Left journalists were among the protestors, down in the tussle, while mainstream reporters observed from a safe
distance, avoiding a potential encounter with violent police.

Mailer also gave accounts of “the [mainstream] press [who were], in the
aftermath, antagonistic to the March” and so included passages of an article from the ''New York Times'' which stated that “[i]t is difficult to report publicly the ugly and vulgar provocation of many of the militants. They spat on some
of the soldiers in the front line at the Pentagon and goaded them with the most vicious personal slander. . . . [M]any officials here are surprised that
there was not much more violence."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=313}} Notice that the ''Times'' does not mention any specific violence of the MPs. Numerous commentators condemned ''not'' the beatings meted out to the demonstrators, but the protest
itself; David Brinkley called it a “coarse, vulgar episode."{{sfn|Wells|1994|p=202–3}} However,
Maurice Isserman, one marcher, remembers the marchers for the most part as peaceful, remaining “pretty true to Gandhian principles."{{sfn|Isserman|2007|p=B15}}

In looking beyond Mailer’s collection of media accounts of the march, it{{pg|486|487}}

is clear that he wasn’t exaggerating the bias against anti-war activists. The
''New York Times'' reported that Robert McNamara felt his soldiers showed “restraint . . . under provocation,"{{sfn|Reston|1967|p=1}} and in one article the protesters
were referred to as “scum of the universe”{{sfn|Roberts|1967|p=45}}; another report called the demonstration “mass paranoia . . . elicit[ing] a great deal of foolishness."{{sfn|Baker|1967|p=45}} What the press wrote about the protestors was not always so disparaging, but rarely was the message of the marchers given much time, and this sort of mainstream coverage was the only information readily
available to the general public about the anti-war movement. Some of the first reports of the march on and the siege of the Pentagon were missing reports of police violence because the reporters went home late Saturday
night before the police began employing more militant tactics. But on Monday in another story of the march the ''New York Times'' still ignored “the bloody military sweep of early Sunday morning;” the ''Washington Post''’s Monday coverage was similar in that it “continued to emphasize the violence
of the protestors, not the defenders of the Pentagon."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=76, 78}} ''Time'' came out with its story a few days after the march on October 27 in which they marginalized the protestors as “left-wing radicals, hippies, acid
heads, and people with painted faces in bizarre costumes” while at the same time “applaud[ing] the government for its restraint."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=79–80}}

Mailer is unwilling to let the picture that the mainstream press drew of demonstrators become the only permanent record, and“he scolded the press for their lies, and their misrepresentation, for their guilt in creating a psychology over the last twenty years in the average American which made wars like Vietnam possible."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=93}} Mailer understands that the press is pivotal in a nation’s critique of its culture and policies, and he takes the press to task for their failure to cultivate an informed public. Eventually, Mailer’s ''Armies'' would stand with media accounts as a record of the event. Before ''Armies'' was published as a book in 1968, it appeared in periodicals (almost the entire issues of ''Harper’s'' and ''Commentary'' were given to this story). So
Mailer responded to the mass media’s “forest of inaccuracy” first in popular periodicals and then in book form. According to Dick Fontaine, a British filmmaker who was filming a documentary of Mailer over the weekend of
the march, “Norman remembered, with frightening accuracy, minutes and minutes, pages and pages, of the dialogues he was having with the others, let alone, of course, the brilliant descriptions of time, place and mood. . . . His
memory and interpretations of . . . [these events] are truly breathtaking.”{{pg|487|488}}

This speaks well of Mailer’s journalistic sensibilities and his hope to avoid a
forest of inaccuracies himself. To this end, it is important to recall that ''Armies''
won a Polk Award for excellence in journalism.

One of the achievements of ''Armies'' is that in it Mailer is able to designate the marchers as patriots, a far cry from the criticism that labeled them “draft
dodgers,” “communists,” and “rabble rousers.” In contrast, Mailer describes draft resisters as moral and courageous: “by handing in draft cards, these
young men were committing their future either to prison, emigration, frustration,
or at best, years where everything must be unknown, and that spoke
of a readiness to take moral leaps . . . [and a] faith in one’s ability to react with
grace."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=88}} Mailer recasts draft dodgers as draft resisters, those willing to risk their lives for peace rather than war. Furthermore, Mailer aligns the march itself with America’s long tradition of ostensibly just and triumphant empire-building conflict. He describes the March on the Pentagon as a rite of passage and connects this to a collection of American moments that could be understood as similar rites of passage, for “each generation
of Americans had forged their own rite, in the forest of the Alleghenies and the Adirondacks, at Valley Forge, at New Orleans in 1812, with Rogers and Clark or at Sutter’s Mill, at Gettysburg, the Alamo, the Klondike, the Argonne, Normandy, Pusan."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=308}} Such a comparison implies that without undergoing such crises the U.S. would not have become a sovereign republic, and so the March on the Pentagon is figured as another historic challenge for the country. This lofty rhetoric is meant to stir a reader’s patriotic sympathies, and Mailer is determined that his audience will see the marchers not as subversives but as patriots within the traditions of American democracy.

Mailer understood that “to affect consciousness is thus to shape power” and that his words were shaping people’s perception of the anti-war movement.
Even if his readers were persuaded to believe in a peaceful resolution to the Vietnam War, what would these readers do with this new consciousness,
a consciousness which was “itself a central ingredient in power”{{sfn|Miller|1990|p=394}}? It is difficult to measure how readers enact their power, but we can watch how Mailer enacts his own. He undertakes his own civil disobedience, getting arrested in hopes of gaining publicity and offering credence to the
cause of the march, and he understands that his symbolic action must be captured by the press to multiply its effect. When writing the story of ''Armies'', Mailer tracks his own movement from critic to supporter to war protester to{{pg|488|489}}

prisoner of conscience, and we see that he “feels the claims of imagination
as urgently as the claims of action,"{{sfn|Behar|1970|p=262}} and so he must both examine and act.

''Armies'' represents, for Mailer, a test of his moral strength, an examination of whether Mailer could stand behind his highest moral principles. The story of ''Armies'' offers a way for Mailer to put his philosophy into action and to answer the question, Are you willing to put your life on the line? David Wyatt calls Mailer “a man so obsessed by courage,” which is a persistent theme in Mailer’s famous essay “The White Negro” (1957).{{sfn|Wyatt|2008|p=318}} In many ways ''Armies'' is tied to all of Mailer’s preceding writing. The most obvious connection is to ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' (1967), but the themes and challenges of ''Armies'' are also indebted to ''Cannibals and Christians'' (1966) and ''The Presidential Papers'' (1963). These books variously tested the warrior in Mailer. Even his first book, ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948), plays a role in the conception of ''Armies''. Mary Dearborn claims that ''Armies'' is a recapitulation of his first novel bringing up questions of “confrontation with and the reaction to authority."{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=244}} In ''Armies'', Mailer’s critique of structures of power and his own civil disobedience stands in clear defiance of authoritarian establishments, the same authoritarian establishments which thwarted characters in his previous texts. Mailer’s working out of his own demons in this
journey from author to activist was also meant to engage the hearts and minds of his readers in the important business of opening their eyes to the truth about the war in Vietnam. But it is not just a story about Mailer or the many Mailer characters; Mailer serves as an entry to the predicament of the war in Vietnam and a people’s various ways to protest it.

Mailer admits early in the story his growing belief that his own writing about the Vietnam War is not enough, that “no project had seemed to cost
him enough,” for his writing was one thing, but action was another. And by simply writing about the Vietnam War “he had been suffering more and more in the past few years from the private conviction that he was getting a
little soft, a hint curdled."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=70–1}} This may have served as a barb at
his audience of readers, among whom surely numbered many armchair revolutionaries.
To keep from getting soft and to resist being contented with a
writer’s perspective, he had to move into action himself. He had to actually
take part in the demonstrations, to be physically, not just ideologically in
opposition to the war, but we are not meant to concentrate solely on Mailer’s own struggle. Rather, from his own story of activism he may bring about in {{pg|489|490}}

his readers a new understanding that through the act of reading one becomes
aware, but not yet ''involved'' in a cause. Readers might appreciate that having their consciousness raised was not the same as protesting the war in
their own communities, not at all the same as stepping out into the streets
to form a human protest. One had to move from words to action, from page to protest.

Mailer asks serious questions of his readers, as Alfred Kazin points out, describing him as the first “leading American peacenik and resister addressing urgent questions to his ‘army’—Are we good enough? How can we overcome
the ‘mediocrity of the middle-class middle-aged masses of the Left?’
The general shoddiness of American standards just now? The tendency of authorities to lie?”{{sfn|Kazin|1968|p=BR 1}} Mailer artfully places such questions within the
framework of a narrative, addressed not only to fellow peaceniks but also to
a popular readership. It was important that this novel travel beyond the Left community, and it did. Indeed, ''Armies'' “reestablished Mailer with a wide audience"{{sfn|Whalen-Bridge|2003|p=217}} and won both the Pulitzer Prize for General
Nonfiction and the National Book Award. And it was gaining a popular audience
(a readership made up of more than those on the Left) for this topic
that was a challenge for Mailer: “walking the parapet between the intellectual
and the popular, and Mailer with his dream of making ‘a revolution in
the consciousness of our time’ is too ambitious to settle for a minority ‘art’
audience."{{sfn|Radford|1983|p=230}} Mailer was ambitious enough to take on the challenge
of telling a story that those within the anti-war movement would rally
around and those outside would give a fair hearing.

The novel, first in serial and then in book form, was meant to prod readers to action. In fact, it is specifically the expansiveness of the novel genre that Mailer finds useful toward a moral end. Mailer understood the great
potential of the genre. In one interview he contends that “art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people. In particular,
I think the novel is at its best the most moral of the art forms because
it’s the most immediate, the most overbearing . . . It is the most
inescapable."{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=384}} Did Mailer’s readers find his story
inescapable, and if so, were they catalyzed to protest the war themselves? The
answer cannot easily be quantified. We can, however, study the way in which Norman Mailer tried to activate readers. Critics picked up on this hunger
of Mailer’s to make change, his “extra-literary hunger for things to change
and change now, in palpable ways rather than in the imaginary, alternative{{pg|490|491}}

ways in which most artist-novelists deal."{{sfn|Gilman|1968|p=27}} This book is not only
a testimony of civil disobedience but also a story which aims to engender civil disobedience in the reader.

Wherever readers stood on the political continuum, ''Armies'' invites readers
to justify events in the book with their real lives; it allows for “[r]eading
history over the edge of text,” which is a combination of “close reading and
analysis that allow us to get ‘inside’ the narrative, while at the same time we
understand that the narrators and subjects of nonfiction . . . live ‘outside’ the
narrative as well."{{sfn|Lehman|1997|p=3}} This makes for an intense reading experience,
especially if the novelist like Mailer uses his skills to capture an already fascinating
or contentious event. One other factor that might have turned contemporary
readers into implicated readers was the timeliness of the book’s
release: the march was more than mere history it was a recent event when the book was published just seven months after the event—and the controversy
over Vietnam still raged on.

In a nonfiction novel such as ''Armies''the story can take on very real manifestations,
which could lead to political action on the part of readers. A
reader could take measure of his or her own (in)action regarding the war
and choose to act out against the war. Such action is difficult to trace, but in
the case of ''Armies'', Rubin claims the novel “became the Bible of the movement”{{sfn|Manso|1985|p=461}}; Dearborn suggests that “young leftists found it an astute
analysis and were impressed by the passion Mailer brought to the work."{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=246}} However, Michael Albert and Noam Chomsky, both major figures in
the anti-war movement, didn’t feel that it made much of an impact within
the movement. Albert recalls “honestly, I doubt if anyone I knew or virtually
anyone in the movement read it, even I didn’t. My guess would be it had [a]
very very modest impact . . . and virtually none inside the movement per
se.” While it is unclear whether it affected those within the movement, it is also difficult to tell how it affected readers just becoming acquainted with the
peace movement. Dearborn indicates that those outside the movement were
touched by the novel: “across the political spectrum, readers who watched
the student movement with varying degrees of approval or censure were
made to understand that what was going on in the streets . . . was a real phenomenon
that had to be taken extremely seriously."{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=246}} Furthermore, the
Pulitzer and National Book Award, which were because of the novel, are a
sort of establishment seals of approval—proof that it had reached middle
America. Contemporary reviewers were generous with their praise. The
{{pg|491|492}}

''London Magazine'' named him “the best living writer of English prose."{{sfn|Bergonzi|1968|p=100}} Others saw ''Armies'' saw as a monumental book, “a literary act
whose significance is certain to grow."{{sfn|Gilman|1968|p=27}} One way the book could
live on was through the reactions of its readers.

Not only was ''Armies'' about politics, but the novel stood as a statement of
the relationship between literature and politics. To ignore politics, for the novelist, is an error. Mailer must speak politically, for “the separation of the
literary and political horizons is a mute acceptance of the structures through
which power is exercised."{{sfn|Schueller|1992|p=127}} Whether his novel convinced one
single person to join the anti-war cause or not, it was a necessary testimony. Simply by representing the happenings of the anti-war movement in narrative
form, Mailer made a new current in American politics. Perhaps Mailer
understood the inescapability of politics, for as an activist author he could
not “dissociate himself from the social contexts through which he speaks."{{sfn|Schueller|1992|p=125}} His story would be null without its complex entanglement with real political struggle.

A contemporary review of ''Armies'' in ''The Nation'' called it “a permanent contribution to our literature—a unique testimony to literary responsiveness and responsibility”{{sfn|Trachtenberg|1968|p=702}}; certainly, Mailer was responding to
important political phenomena that had not received sustained literary attention.
His writing about the rifts within the tumultuous New Left, the division
between Americans for and against the war, and the response of
government and the press to the anti-war movement did delineate important
political issues that needed to be aired. Mailer did not shy away from critique of the government or the media or of himself in order to tell the story of those in the anti-war movement.

Mailer’s novel represents a catalyst for social change through its introduction
of an anti-war subculture to a popular audience. Mailer speaks candidly
about his intentions: “I was trying to bring a consciousness to America
about the war in Vietnam. . . . I think the effect of the book was to make resistance to the war in Vietnam a little more human to people who were still supporting the war. So, yes, I think the book did have a political effect. Maybe it tended to strengthen the side opposed to the war in Vietnam."{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=220}} Jason Epstein recalls ''Armies'' as a book “meant to rally or produce a political reaction”{{sfn|Manso|1985|p=470}}; a strong argument can be made for the fact that Mailer meant to catalyze his readers. He attested to the disorganization
and dissension within the anti-war camp, but more vigorously{{pg|492|493}}
showed the misrepresentation, defamation, and even the physical denigration
of the activists. His argument for peace in Vietnam gained stature because he was a bona fide activist for the cause, facing arrest to further the significance of his protest. He was there, present at the march, and authenticated his action by telling the story of the march. ''The Armies of the Night'' exists as a testament to the anti-war movement and to the efficacy of civil disobedience.

===Citations===
{{reflist|20em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1}}
* {{citation
| last = Albert
| first = Michael
| title = A Referral from Noam Chomsky
| date = 10 November 2009
| publisher = Message to Katharine Westaway. E-mail.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Baker
| first = Russell
| title = Observer: Dove Antics
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 24 October 1967
| page = 45
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Behar
| first = Jack
| title = History and Fiction
| journal = NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction
| volume = 3
| issue = 3
| year = 1970
| pages = 260–265
| ref = harv
}}
*{{cite magazine
| last = Bergonzi
| first = Bernard
| title = Selected Books
| magazine = London Magazine
| date = November 1968
| pages = 98–100
| quote = Rev. of ''Cannibals and Christians'' and ''Armies of the Night,'' by Norman Mailer.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Dearborn
| first = Mary V.
| title = Mailer: A Biography
| publisher = Houghton Mifflin
| location = Boston
| year = 1999
| ref = harv
}}
* {{citation
| last = Fontaine
| first = Dick
| title = Question for Dick Fontaine
| date = 1 April 2009
| publisher = Message to Katharine Westaway. E-mail.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| editor-last = Gallup
| editor-first = George Horace
| title = Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1935–1971
| volume = 3
| publisher = Random House
| location = New York
| year = 1972
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Gilman
| first = Richard
| title = What Mailer Has Done
| magazine = The New Republic
| date = 8 June 1968
| pages = 27–31
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Isserman
| first = Maurice
| title = The Flower and the Gun
| magazine = The Chronicle of Higher Education
| date = 19 October 2007
| pages = B14–B15
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Kazin
| first = Alfred
| title = The Trouble He’s Seen
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 5 May 1968
| page = BR1
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Lehman
| first = Daniel W.
| title = Matters of Fact: Reading Nonfiction over the Edge
| publisher = Ohio State UP
| location = Columbus
| year = 1997
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = MacFarlane
| first = Scott
| title = The Hippie Narrative: A Literary Perspective on the Counterculture
| publisher = McFarland
| location = Jefferson
| year = 2007
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Mailer
| first = Norman
| title = Advertisements for Myself
| publisher = G. P. Putnam’s Sons
| location = New York
| year = 1959
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Mailer
| first = Norman
| author-mask=1
| title = Existential Aesthetics: An Interview with Norman Mailer
| others = Interview by Laura Adams
| editor-last = Lennon
| editor-first = J. Michael
| book-title = Conversations with Norman Mailer
| publisher = UP of Mississippi
| location = Jackson
| year = 1988
| pages = 207–227
| quote = Rpt. of "Existential Aesthetics: An Interview with Norman Mailer." ''Partisan Review'' 42.2 (1975): 197–214.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Mailer
| first = Norman
| author-mask=1
| chapter = Prisoner of Success: An Interview with Paul Attanasio
| editor-last = Lennon
| editor-first = J. Michael
| title = Pieces and Pontifications
| publisher = Little, Brown & Company
| location = Boston
| year = 1982
| pages = 129–136
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Manso
| first = Peter
| title = Norman Mailer: His Life and Times
| publisher = Simon and Schuster
| location = New York
| year = 1985
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Miller
| first = Joshua
| title = No Success Like Failure: Existential Politics in Norman Mailer’s ''The Armies of the Night''
| journal = Polity
| volume = 22
| issue = 3
| year = 1990
| pages = 379–396
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Radford
| first = Jean
| chapter = Norman Mailer: The True Story of an American Writer
| editor-last = Gray
| editor-first = Richard
| title = American Fiction: New Readings
| publisher = Vision Press
| location = London
| year = 1983
| pages = 222–237
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Reston
| first = James
| title = Everyone is a Loser
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 23 October 1967
| page = 1
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Roberts
| first = Gene
| title = Wallace Derides War Protesters
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 29 October 1967
| page = 45
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Schueller
| first = Malini Johar
| title = The Politics of Voice: Liberalism and Social Criticism from Franklin to Kingston
| publisher = State University of New York Press
| location = Albany
| year = 1992
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Scott
| first = Nathan A.
| title = Three American Moralists: Mailer, Bellow, Trilling
| publisher = U of Notre Dame P
| location = Notre Dame
| year = 1973
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Small
| first = Melvin
| title = Covering Dissent: The Media and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement
| publisher = Rutgers UP
| location = New Brunswick
| year = 1994
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Streitmatter
| first = Rodger
| author-mask=1
| title = Mightier Than the Sword: How the News Media Have Shaped American History
| publisher = Westview
| location = Boulder
| year = 1997
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Streitmatter
| first = Rodger
| title = Voices of Revolution: The Dissident Press in America
| publisher = Columbia UP
| location = New York
| year = 2001
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Trachtenberg
| first = Alan
| title = Mailer on the Steps of the Pentagon
| magazine = The Nation
| date = 27 May 1968
| pages = 701–702
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Wells
| first = Tom
| title = The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam
| publisher = U of California P
| location = Berkeley
| year = 1994
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Whalen-Bridge
| first = John
| chapter = Norman Mailer
| editor-first = James R.
| editor-last = Giles
| editor2-first = Wanda H.
| editor2-last = Giles
| title = American Novelists Since World War II. Seventh Series
| series = Dictionary of Literary Biography
| volume = 278
| publisher = Gale Group
| location = New York
| year = 2003
| pages = 217–232
| quote = Vol. 278 of ''Dictionary of Literary Biography''. 357 vols. to date. 1978–.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Wyatt
| first = David
| title = Living Out the Sixties
| journal = The Hopkins Review
| volume = 1
| issue = 2
| year = 2008
| pages = 315–332
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last1 = Zaroulis
| first1 = Nancy
| last2 = Sullivan
| first2 = Gerald
| title = Who Spoke Up? American Protest Against the War in Vietnam 1963–1975
| publisher = Doubleday
| location = Garden City
| year = 1984
| ref = harv
}}
{{Refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:“A Noble Pursuit”: The Armies of the Night as Outside Agitator: }}
[[Category:Miscellany (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/“A Noble Pursuit”: The Armies of the Night as Outside Agitator

2025-04-20T23:03:04Z

Chelsey.brantley: Added indent to Works Cited

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{Byline|last=Westaway|first=Katharine|url=https://prmlr.us/mr07dick|abstract=One of the achievements of ''The Armies of the Night'' is that Norman Mailer is able to designate the marchers as patriots, a far cry from the criticism that labeled them “draft dodgers,” “communists,” and “rabble rousers.” Mailer aligns the march itself with America’s long tradition of ostensibly just and triumphant empire-building conflict. He describes the March on the Pentagon as a rite of passage and connects this to a collection of American moments that could be understood as similar rites of passage.}}

{{dc|dc=O|n a weekend in October of 1967,}} tens of thousands of demonstrators
amassed in Washington DC to protest the war in Vietnam. Intending ''The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History'' (1968) to record and commemorate this eventful weekend, Norman Mailer enlarged the march on the Pentagon’s meaning, working as a novelist to make it more
than a four-day set of tremors in the nation’s capital. Some consider the
march a watershed moment, “the first in a chain of events that led to Lyndon
Johnson’s decision . . . to deescalate in Vietnam."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=70}} Mailer’s
nonfiction novel carefully examines this defining event of American history.
Through Mailer’s dual role as a demonstrator and narrator, readers are provided
a rich witness to the many obstacles that were set before marchers in the form of a biased media and government officials opposed to the peace
movement, including the military and police whose physical abuse is featured in the novel.

''Armies'' is also concerned with a sweeping view of American culture ''vis-à-vis'' the march, for this is a “literary project . . . radically committed to a
rendering of the American reality”,{{sfn|Scott|1973|p=18}} and ''Armies'' becomes Mailer’s
attempt to expand upon the march’s implications for the national character.
When ''Armies'' was published, the country was divided over the war in Vietnam; according to a 1967 Gallup poll, when asked whether “the U.S. made a mistake sending troops to Vietnam” forty-six percent said yes while almost an equal amount, forty-four percent, answered no.{{sfn|Gallup|1972|p=2087}} Mailer addresses
the division over the war and also the disparaging of anti-war {{pg|483|484}}
protestors in the mainstream press which created a gulf between mainstream America and the anti-war movement: “from late 1967 into 1968 when Mailer wrote this book, open season on the ‘hippie’ had been tacitly declared."{{sfn|MacFarlane|2007|p=131}} Mailer works to familiarize the populace with these voices of
dissent and to humanize them. The cultural clashes Mailer depicts epitomize the volatility of the U.S. at that moment, the rips in the social fabric that were becoming obvious during the escalation of the Vietnam War.

I will also consider how this novel might have acted as a catalyst for activism
for some contemporary readers and how it worked to coalesce support for the anti-war movement, addressing those Americans who were either unsympathetic towards or even appalled by the anti-war protesters
and challenging readers to see the efficacy and patriotism of the marchers’ cause. It is difficult to gauge the novel’s effectiveness on this front, but I will
consider media coverage and popular reaction to the marchers and to the
book itself. It is in the novelistic form that Mailer shares this moment in history,
and he has said that the reading of novels “is a noble pursuit, that ideally
it profoundly changes the ways in which people perceive their
experience."{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=133}} Mailer understood the great possibility of his
novel to effect change and the opportunity he had to shape readers’ understanding
of what it meant to protest the war in Vietnam.

The political divide was so great in America in the late 1960s that Mailer may have felt obliged to explain one faction to another, to use as a didactic
tool; he was teaching about a counterculture, from which many Americans
were insulated. Scott MacFarlane measures the social turmoil of the times “at a level unseen since the Civil War. The book reading public was clamoring for insight into what was happening on the streets of America."{{sfn|MacFarlane|2007|p=133}} ''Armies'' was a new window into the anti-war movement. The mainstream
media kept Americans in the dark about the anti-war movement. Readers
were witness to Mailer’s own perspective of the counterculture which was not always exhortative: “It was the children in whom Mailer had some hope, a gloomy hope. These mad middle-class children with their lobotomies from
sin, their nihilistic embezzlement of all middle-class moral funds, their innocence,
their lust for apocalypse, their unbelievable indifference to waste."{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=44}} Mailer does not form saints out of the anti-war camp, and
one could not accuse Mailer of being an outright defender of the counterculture.
But through his intimate sketches of the activists and his own experience
as a fellow marcher, we do see images of greatness, of self-sacrifice and {{pg|484|485}}
patriotism. Most important, Mailer, as narrator/protagonist, gives Americans
outside the march a sense of what it was to be a demonstrator.

One of Mailer’s main tasks as an author is to acquaint his readers with the
character of the marchers themselves, so a primary concern of ''Armies'' is media bias as it affected the American public’s sentiments about the acts of resistance happening all around them. But the mainstream press was hawkish:
before the Tet Offensive in January of 1968, “not a single major newspaper
or television network call[ed] for the end to the war."{{sfn|Streitmatter|2001|p=197}} In fact, the mainstream media plainly opposed the anti-war effort “in the heady days early in the war when American correspondents doubled as government handmaidens, they openly condemned anti-war protesters as traitors."{{sfn|Streitmatter|1997|p=201}} This was the atmosphere in which
Mailer attempted to tell a moving tale of the anti-war movement.

Mailer renounces conventional journalism; he doesn’t trust the media to analyze the anti-war movement fairly. Media studies of the time show that
“throughout [the] various stages of escalating involvement, mainstream
American journalists supported the effort, serving as exuberant cheerleaders
for the military."{{sfn|Streitmatter|2001|p=184}} Mailer frequently points out
the unfair coverage that the press gave to the actions of the demonstrators
and how "[e]mphasis was put on every rock thrown, and a count was made of the windows broken. (There were, however, only a few.) But there was no
specific mention of The Wedge [a brutal crowd control technique, which resulted
in beating of the marchers]. Indeed, stories [of police brutality]
quickly disappeared."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=313-14}} This becomes evident as Mailer distinguishes
the reporting of mainstream press from that of the alternative
press. The alternative press (such as the ''Catholic Worker'', ''I.F. Stone’s Weekly,
''National Guardian'', and ''Ramparts'') was critical of the war going back in some
cases to the 1950s when troops were first deployed to Vietnam.{{sfn|Streitmatter|2001|p=184}}

One of the most damning charges in the book is the brutality perpetrated
against the marchers, who were for the most part peacefully protesting; some
protestors were “clubbed until they were broken and bloody."{{sfn|Zaroulis|Sullivan|1984|p=138}} The abuse was amplified by the fact that it often went unreported.
For the reports of police violence, Mailer relies upon outside sources
because he had been arrested early in the demonstration before most of the
violence occurred. Yet he gains credibility when integrating outside witnesses
and reportage into a book that was mostly reported from his standpoint,{{pg|485|486}}
and these external sources may have lent more authority to the charge that
protesters were abused. For any journalist there was difficulty in covering
something as large as the march on the Pentagon “because of the extensive
terrain in question and the rapid movements of the protestors and soldiers."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=72}} Acting as a novelist-journalist, Mailer collects varied media accounts
of the march and weaves them into the narrative; here he features
one Leftist perspective of the march, identifying the witness as “Harvey
Mayes of the English Department at Hunter”:
<blockquote>One soldier spilled the water from his canteen on the ground in order to add to the discomfort of the female demonstrator at his feet. She cursed him—understandably, I think—and shifted her body. She lost her balance and her shoulder hit the rifle at the soldier’s side. He raised the rifle, and with its butt, came down hard on the girl’s leg. The girl tried to move back but was not fast enough to avoid the billy-club of a soldier in the second row of the troops. At least four times that soldier hit her with all his force.{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=303}}</blockquote>
Mailer was obliged to portray the graphic scenes from the march which were missing in many media reports. Perhaps the stories of abuse were reported on more by the Left media because the Left journalists were among the protestors, down in the tussle, while mainstream reporters observed from a safe
distance, avoiding a potential encounter with violent police.

Mailer also gave accounts of “the [mainstream] press [who were], in the
aftermath, antagonistic to the March” and so included passages of an article from the ''New York Times'' which stated that “[i]t is difficult to report publicly the ugly and vulgar provocation of many of the militants. They spat on some
of the soldiers in the front line at the Pentagon and goaded them with the most vicious personal slander. . . . [M]any officials here are surprised that
there was not much more violence."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=313}} Notice that the ''Times'' does not mention any specific violence of the MPs. Numerous commentators condemned ''not'' the beatings meted out to the demonstrators, but the protest
itself; David Brinkley called it a “coarse, vulgar episode."{{sfn|Wells|1994|p=202–3}} However,
Maurice Isserman, one marcher, remembers the marchers for the most part as peaceful, remaining “pretty true to Gandhian principles."{{sfn|Isserman|2007|p=B15}}

In looking beyond Mailer’s collection of media accounts of the march, it{{pg|486|487}}

is clear that he wasn’t exaggerating the bias against anti-war activists. The
''New York Times'' reported that Robert McNamara felt his soldiers showed “restraint . . . under provocation,"{{sfn|Reston|1967|p=1}} and in one article the protesters
were referred to as “scum of the universe”{{sfn|Roberts|1967|p=45}}; another report called the demonstration “mass paranoia . . . elicit[ing] a great deal of foolishness."{{sfn|Baker|1967|p=45}} What the press wrote about the protestors was not always so disparaging, but rarely was the message of the marchers given much time, and this sort of mainstream coverage was the only information readily
available to the general public about the anti-war movement. Some of the first reports of the march on and the siege of the Pentagon were missing reports of police violence because the reporters went home late Saturday
night before the police began employing more militant tactics. But on Monday in another story of the march the ''New York Times'' still ignored “the bloody military sweep of early Sunday morning;” the ''Washington Post''’s Monday coverage was similar in that it “continued to emphasize the violence
of the protestors, not the defenders of the Pentagon."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=76, 78}} ''Time'' came out with its story a few days after the march on October 27 in which they marginalized the protestors as “left-wing radicals, hippies, acid
heads, and people with painted faces in bizarre costumes” while at the same time “applaud[ing] the government for its restraint."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=79–80}}

Mailer is unwilling to let the picture that the mainstream press drew of demonstrators become the only permanent record, and“he scolded the press for their lies, and their misrepresentation, for their guilt in creating a psychology over the last twenty years in the average American which made wars like Vietnam possible."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=93}} Mailer understands that the press is pivotal in a nation’s critique of its culture and policies, and he takes the press to task for their failure to cultivate an informed public. Eventually, Mailer’s ''Armies'' would stand with media accounts as a record of the event. Before ''Armies'' was published as a book in 1968, it appeared in periodicals (almost the entire issues of ''Harper’s'' and ''Commentary'' were given to this story). So
Mailer responded to the mass media’s “forest of inaccuracy” first in popular periodicals and then in book form. According to Dick Fontaine, a British filmmaker who was filming a documentary of Mailer over the weekend of
the march, “Norman remembered, with frightening accuracy, minutes and minutes, pages and pages, of the dialogues he was having with the others, let alone, of course, the brilliant descriptions of time, place and mood. . . . His
memory and interpretations of . . . [these events] are truly breathtaking.”{{pg|487|488}}

This speaks well of Mailer’s journalistic sensibilities and his hope to avoid a
forest of inaccuracies himself. To this end, it is important to recall that ''Armies''
won a Polk Award for excellence in journalism.

One of the achievements of ''Armies'' is that in it Mailer is able to designate the marchers as patriots, a far cry from the criticism that labeled them “draft
dodgers,” “communists,” and “rabble rousers.” In contrast, Mailer describes draft resisters as moral and courageous: “by handing in draft cards, these
young men were committing their future either to prison, emigration, frustration,
or at best, years where everything must be unknown, and that spoke
of a readiness to take moral leaps . . . [and a] faith in one’s ability to react with
grace."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=88}} Mailer recasts draft dodgers as draft resisters, those willing to risk their lives for peace rather than war. Furthermore, Mailer aligns the march itself with America’s long tradition of ostensibly just and triumphant empire-building conflict. He describes the March on the Pentagon as a rite of passage and connects this to a collection of American moments that could be understood as similar rites of passage, for “each generation
of Americans had forged their own rite, in the forest of the Alleghenies and the Adirondacks, at Valley Forge, at New Orleans in 1812, with Rogers and Clark or at Sutter’s Mill, at Gettysburg, the Alamo, the Klondike, the Argonne, Normandy, Pusan."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=308}} Such a comparison implies that without undergoing such crises the U.S. would not have become a sovereign republic, and so the March on the Pentagon is figured as another historic challenge for the country. This lofty rhetoric is meant to stir a reader’s patriotic sympathies, and Mailer is determined that his audience will see the marchers not as subversives but as patriots within the traditions of American democracy.

Mailer understood that “to affect consciousness is thus to shape power” and that his words were shaping people’s perception of the anti-war movement.
Even if his readers were persuaded to believe in a peaceful resolution to the Vietnam War, what would these readers do with this new consciousness,
a consciousness which was “itself a central ingredient in power”{{sfn|Miller|1990|p=394}}? It is difficult to measure how readers enact their power, but we can watch how Mailer enacts his own. He undertakes his own civil disobedience, getting arrested in hopes of gaining publicity and offering credence to the
cause of the march, and he understands that his symbolic action must be captured by the press to multiply its effect. When writing the story of ''Armies'', Mailer tracks his own movement from critic to supporter to war protester to{{pg|488|489}}

prisoner of conscience, and we see that he “feels the claims of imagination
as urgently as the claims of action,"{{sfn|Behar|1970|p=262}} and so he must both examine and act.

''Armies'' represents, for Mailer, a test of his moral strength, an examination of whether Mailer could stand behind his highest moral principles. The story of ''Armies'' offers a way for Mailer to put his philosophy into action and to answer the question, Are you willing to put your life on the line? David Wyatt calls Mailer “a man so obsessed by courage,” which is a persistent theme in Mailer’s famous essay “The White Negro” (1957).{{sfn|Wyatt|2008|p=318}} In many ways ''Armies'' is tied to all of Mailer’s preceding writing. The most obvious connection is to ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' (1967), but the themes and challenges of ''Armies'' are also indebted to ''Cannibals and Christians'' (1966) and ''The Presidential Papers'' (1963). These books variously tested the warrior in Mailer. Even his first book, ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948), plays a role in the conception of ''Armies''. Mary Dearborn claims that ''Armies'' is a recapitulation of his first novel bringing up questions of “confrontation with and the reaction to authority."{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=244}} In ''Armies'', Mailer’s critique of structures of power and his own civil disobedience stands in clear defiance of authoritarian establishments, the same authoritarian establishments which thwarted characters in his previous texts. Mailer’s working out of his own demons in this
journey from author to activist was also meant to engage the hearts and minds of his readers in the important business of opening their eyes to the truth about the war in Vietnam. But it is not just a story about Mailer or the many Mailer characters; Mailer serves as an entry to the predicament of the war in Vietnam and a people’s various ways to protest it.

Mailer admits early in the story his growing belief that his own writing about the Vietnam War is not enough, that “no project had seemed to cost
him enough,” for his writing was one thing, but action was another. And by simply writing about the Vietnam War “he had been suffering more and more in the past few years from the private conviction that he was getting a
little soft, a hint curdled."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=70–1}} This may have served as a barb at
his audience of readers, among whom surely numbered many armchair revolutionaries.
To keep from getting soft and to resist being contented with a
writer’s perspective, he had to move into action himself. He had to actually
take part in the demonstrations, to be physically, not just ideologically in
opposition to the war, but we are not meant to concentrate solely on Mailer’s own struggle. Rather, from his own story of activism he may bring about in {{pg|489|490}}

his readers a new understanding that through the act of reading one becomes
aware, but not yet ''involved'' in a cause. Readers might appreciate that having their consciousness raised was not the same as protesting the war in
their own communities, not at all the same as stepping out into the streets
to form a human protest. One had to move from words to action, from page to protest.

Mailer asks serious questions of his readers, as Alfred Kazin points out, describing him as the first “leading American peacenik and resister addressing urgent questions to his ‘army’—Are we good enough? How can we overcome
the ‘mediocrity of the middle-class middle-aged masses of the Left?’
The general shoddiness of American standards just now? The tendency of authorities to lie?”{{sfn|Kazin|1968|p=BR 1}} Mailer artfully places such questions within the
framework of a narrative, addressed not only to fellow peaceniks but also to
a popular readership. It was important that this novel travel beyond the Left community, and it did. Indeed, ''Armies'' “reestablished Mailer with a wide audience"{{sfn|Whalen-Bridge|2003|p=217}} and won both the Pulitzer Prize for General
Nonfiction and the National Book Award. And it was gaining a popular audience
(a readership made up of more than those on the Left) for this topic
that was a challenge for Mailer: “walking the parapet between the intellectual
and the popular, and Mailer with his dream of making ‘a revolution in
the consciousness of our time’ is too ambitious to settle for a minority ‘art’
audience."{{sfn|Radford|1983|p=230}} Mailer was ambitious enough to take on the challenge
of telling a story that those within the anti-war movement would rally
around and those outside would give a fair hearing.

The novel, first in serial and then in book form, was meant to prod readers to action. In fact, it is specifically the expansiveness of the novel genre that Mailer finds useful toward a moral end. Mailer understood the great
potential of the genre. In one interview he contends that “art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people. In particular,
I think the novel is at its best the most moral of the art forms because
it’s the most immediate, the most overbearing . . . It is the most
inescapable."{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=384}} Did Mailer’s readers find his story
inescapable, and if so, were they catalyzed to protest the war themselves? The
answer cannot easily be quantified. We can, however, study the way in which Norman Mailer tried to activate readers. Critics picked up on this hunger
of Mailer’s to make change, his “extra-literary hunger for things to change
and change now, in palpable ways rather than in the imaginary, alternative{{pg|490|491}}

ways in which most artist-novelists deal."{{sfn|Gilman|1968|p=27}} This book is not only
a testimony of civil disobedience but also a story which aims to engender civil disobedience in the reader.

Wherever readers stood on the political continuum, ''Armies'' invites readers
to justify events in the book with their real lives; it allows for “[r]eading
history over the edge of text,” which is a combination of “close reading and
analysis that allow us to get ‘inside’ the narrative, while at the same time we
understand that the narrators and subjects of nonfiction . . . live ‘outside’ the
narrative as well."{{sfn|Lehman|1997|p=3}} This makes for an intense reading experience,
especially if the novelist like Mailer uses his skills to capture an already fascinating
or contentious event. One other factor that might have turned contemporary
readers into implicated readers was the timeliness of the book’s
release: the march was more than mere history it was a recent event when the book was published just seven months after the event—and the controversy
over Vietnam still raged on.

In a nonfiction novel such as ''Armies''the story can take on very real manifestations,
which could lead to political action on the part of readers. A
reader could take measure of his or her own (in)action regarding the war
and choose to act out against the war. Such action is difficult to trace, but in
the case of ''Armies'', Rubin claims the novel “became the Bible of the movement”{{sfn|Manso|1985|p=461}}; Dearborn suggests that “young leftists found it an astute
analysis and were impressed by the passion Mailer brought to the work."{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=246}} However, Michael Albert and Noam Chomsky, both major figures in
the anti-war movement, didn’t feel that it made much of an impact within
the movement. Albert recalls “honestly, I doubt if anyone I knew or virtually
anyone in the movement read it, even I didn’t. My guess would be it had [a]
very very modest impact . . . and virtually none inside the movement per
se.” While it is unclear whether it affected those within the movement, it is also difficult to tell how it affected readers just becoming acquainted with the
peace movement. Dearborn indicates that those outside the movement were
touched by the novel: “across the political spectrum, readers who watched
the student movement with varying degrees of approval or censure were
made to understand that what was going on in the streets . . . was a real phenomenon
that had to be taken extremely seriously."{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=246}} Furthermore, the
Pulitzer and National Book Award, which were because of the novel, are a
sort of establishment seals of approval—proof that it had reached middle
America. Contemporary reviewers were generous with their praise. The
{{pg|491|492}}

''London Magazine'' named him “the best living writer of English prose."{{sfn|Bergonzi|1968|p=100}} Others saw ''Armies'' saw as a monumental book, “a literary act
whose significance is certain to grow."{{sfn|Gilman|1968|p=27}} One way the book could
live on was through the reactions of its readers.

Not only was ''Armies'' about politics, but the novel stood as a statement of
the relationship between literature and politics. To ignore politics, for the novelist, is an error. Mailer must speak politically, for “the separation of the
literary and political horizons is a mute acceptance of the structures through
which power is exercised."{{sfn|Schueller|1992|p=127}} Whether his novel convinced one
single person to join the anti-war cause or not, it was a necessary testimony. Simply by representing the happenings of the anti-war movement in narrative
form, Mailer made a new current in American politics. Perhaps Mailer
understood the inescapability of politics, for as an activist author he could
not “dissociate himself from the social contexts through which he speaks."{{sfn|Schueller|1992|p=125}} His story would be null without its complex entanglement with real political struggle.

A contemporary review of ''Armies'' in ''The Nation'' called it “a permanent contribution to our literature—a unique testimony to literary responsiveness and responsibility”{{sfn|Trachtenberg|1968|p=702}}; certainly, Mailer was responding to
important political phenomena that had not received sustained literary attention.
His writing about the rifts within the tumultuous New Left, the division
between Americans for and against the war, and the response of
government and the press to the anti-war movement did delineate important
political issues that needed to be aired. Mailer did not shy away from critique of the government or the media or of himself in order to tell the story of those in the anti-war movement.

Mailer’s novel represents a catalyst for social change through its introduction
of an anti-war subculture to a popular audience. Mailer speaks candidly
about his intentions: “I was trying to bring a consciousness to America
about the war in Vietnam. . . . I think the effect of the book was to make resistance to the war in Vietnam a little more human to people who were still supporting the war. So, yes, I think the book did have a political effect. Maybe it tended to strengthen the side opposed to the war in Vietnam."{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=220}} Jason Epstein recalls ''Armies'' as a book “meant to rally or produce a political reaction”{{sfn|Manso|1985|p=470}}; a strong argument can be made for the fact that Mailer meant to catalyze his readers. He attested to the disorganization
and dissension within the anti-war camp, but more vigorously{{pg|492|493}}
showed the misrepresentation, defamation, and even the physical denigration
of the activists. His argument for peace in Vietnam gained stature because he was a bona fide activist for the cause, facing arrest to further the significance of his protest. He was there, present at the march, and authenticated his action by telling the story of the march. ''The Armies of the Night'' exists as a testament to the anti-war movement and to the efficacy of civil disobedience.

===Citations===
{{reflist|20em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1}}
* {{citation
| last = Albert
| first = Michael
| title = A Referral from Noam Chomsky
| date = 10 November 2009
| publisher = Message to Katharine Westaway. E-mail.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Baker
| first = Russell
| title = Observer: Dove Antics
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 24 October 1967
| page = 45
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Behar
| first = Jack
| title = History and Fiction
| journal = NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction
| volume = 3
| issue = 3
| year = 1970
| pages = 260–265
| ref = harv
}}
*{{cite magazine
| last = Bergonzi
| first = Bernard
| title = Selected Books
| magazine = London Magazine
| date = November 1968
| pages = 98–100
| quote = Rev. of ''Cannibals and Christians'' and ''Armies of the Night,'' by Norman Mailer.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Dearborn
| first = Mary V.
| title = Mailer: A Biography
| publisher = Houghton Mifflin
| location = Boston
| year = 1999
| ref = harv
}}
* {{citation
| last = Fontaine
| first = Dick
| title = Question for Dick Fontaine
| date = 1 April 2009
| publisher = Message to Katharine Westaway. E-mail.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| editor-last = Gallup
| editor-first = George Horace
| title = Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1935–1971
| volume = 3
| publisher = Random House
| location = New York
| year = 1972
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Gilman
| first = Richard
| title = What Mailer Has Done
| magazine = The New Republic
| date = 8 June 1968
| pages = 27–31
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Isserman
| first = Maurice
| title = The Flower and the Gun
| magazine = The Chronicle of Higher Education
| date = 19 October 2007
| pages = B14–B15
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Kazin
| first = Alfred
| title = The Trouble He’s Seen
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 5 May 1968
| page = BR1
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Lehman
| first = Daniel W.
| title = Matters of Fact: Reading Nonfiction over the Edge
| publisher = Ohio State UP
| location = Columbus
| year = 1997
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = MacFarlane
| first = Scott
| title = The Hippie Narrative: A Literary Perspective on the Counterculture
| publisher = McFarland
| location = Jefferson
| year = 2007
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Mailer
| first = Norman
| title = Advertisements for Myself
| publisher = G. P. Putnam’s Sons
| location = New York
| year = 1959
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Mailer
| first = Norman
| title = Existential Aesthetics: An Interview with Norman Mailer
| others = Interview by Laura Adams
| editor-last = Lennon
| editor-first = J. Michael
| book-title = Conversations with Norman Mailer
| publisher = UP of Mississippi
| location = Jackson
| year = 1988
| pages = 207–227
| quote = Rpt. of "Existential Aesthetics: An Interview with Norman Mailer." ''Partisan Review'' 42.2 (1975): 197–214.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
|last = Mailer
| first = Norman
| chapter = Prisoner of Success: An Interview with Paul Attanasio
| editor-last = Lennon
| editor-first = J. Michael
| title = Pieces and Pontifications
| publisher = Little, Brown & Company
| location = Boston
| year = 1982
| pages = 129–136
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Manso
| first = Peter
| title = Norman Mailer: His Life and Times
| publisher = Simon and Schuster
| location = New York
| year = 1985
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Miller
| first = Joshua
| title = No Success Like Failure: Existential Politics in Norman Mailer’s ''The Armies of the Night''
| journal = Polity
| volume = 22
| issue = 3
| year = 1990
| pages = 379–396
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Radford
| first = Jean
| chapter = Norman Mailer: The True Story of an American Writer
| editor-last = Gray
| editor-first = Richard
| title = American Fiction: New Readings
| publisher = Vision Press
| location = London
| year = 1983
| pages = 222–237
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Reston
| first = James
| title = Everyone is a Loser
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 23 October 1967
| page = 1
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Roberts
| first = Gene
| title = Wallace Derides War Protesters
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 29 October 1967
| page = 45
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Schueller
| first = Malini Johar
| title = The Politics of Voice: Liberalism and Social Criticism from Franklin to Kingston
| publisher = State University of New York Press
| location = Albany
| year = 1992
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Scott
| first = Nathan A.
| title = Three American Moralists: Mailer, Bellow, Trilling
| publisher = U of Notre Dame P
| location = Notre Dame
| year = 1973
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Small
| first = Melvin
| title = Covering Dissent: The Media and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement
| publisher = Rutgers UP
| location = New Brunswick
| year = 1994
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Streitmatter
| first = Rodger
| title = Mightier Than the Sword: How the News Media Have Shaped American History
| publisher = Westview
| location = Boulder
| year = 1997
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Streitmatter
| first = Rodger
| title = Voices of Revolution: The Dissident Press in America
| publisher = Columbia UP
| location = New York
| year = 2001
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Trachtenberg
| first = Alan
| title = Mailer on the Steps of the Pentagon
| magazine = The Nation
| date = 27 May 1968
| pages = 701–702
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Wells
| first = Tom
| title = The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam
| publisher = U of California P
| location = Berkeley
| year = 1994
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Whalen-Bridge
| first = John
| chapter = Norman Mailer
| editor-first = James R.
| editor-last = Giles
| editor2-first = Wanda H.
| editor2-last = Giles
| title = American Novelists Since World War II. Seventh Series
| series = Dictionary of Literary Biography
| volume = 278
| publisher = Gale Group
| location = New York
| year = 2003
| pages = 217–232
| quote = Vol. 278 of ''Dictionary of Literary Biography''. 357 vols. to date. 1978–.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Wyatt
| first = David
| title = Living Out the Sixties
| journal = The Hopkins Review
| volume = 1
| issue = 2
| year = 2008
| pages = 315–332
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last1 = Zaroulis
| first1 = Nancy
| last2 = Sullivan
| first2 = Gerald
| title = Who Spoke Up? American Protest Against the War in Vietnam 1963–1975
| publisher = Doubleday
| location = Garden City
| year = 1984
| ref = harv
}}
{{Refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:“A Noble Pursuit”: The Armies of the Night as Outside Agitator: }}
[[Category:Miscellany (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/“A Noble Pursuit”: The Armies of the Night as Outside Agitator

2025-04-20T22:35:20Z

Chelsey.brantley: Corrected citations so that SFN code correctly connects to Works Cited

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{Byline|last=Westaway|first=Katharine|url=https://prmlr.us/mr07dick|abstract=One of the achievements of ''The Armies of the Night'' is that Norman Mailer is able to designate the marchers as patriots, a far cry from the criticism that labeled them “draft dodgers,” “communists,” and “rabble rousers.” Mailer aligns the march itself with America’s long tradition of ostensibly just and triumphant empire-building conflict. He describes the March on the Pentagon as a rite of passage and connects this to a collection of American moments that could be understood as similar rites of passage.}}

{{dc|dc=O|n a weekend in October of 1967,}} tens of thousands of demonstrators
amassed in Washington DC to protest the war in Vietnam. Intending ''The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History'' (1968) to record and commemorate this eventful weekend, Norman Mailer enlarged the march on the Pentagon’s meaning, working as a novelist to make it more
than a four-day set of tremors in the nation’s capital. Some consider the
march a watershed moment, “the first in a chain of events that led to Lyndon
Johnson’s decision . . . to deescalate in Vietnam."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=70}} Mailer’s
nonfiction novel carefully examines this defining event of American history.
Through Mailer’s dual role as a demonstrator and narrator, readers are provided
a rich witness to the many obstacles that were set before marchers in the form of a biased media and government officials opposed to the peace
movement, including the military and police whose physical abuse is featured in the novel.

''Armies'' is also concerned with a sweeping view of American culture ''vis-à-vis'' the march, for this is a “literary project . . . radically committed to a
rendering of the American reality”,{{sfn|Scott|1973|p=18}} and ''Armies'' becomes Mailer’s
attempt to expand upon the march’s implications for the national character.
When ''Armies'' was published, the country was divided over the war in Vietnam; according to a 1967 Gallup poll, when asked whether “the U.S. made a mistake sending troops to Vietnam” forty-six percent said yes while almost an equal amount, forty-four percent, answered no.{{sfn|Gallup|1972|p=2087}} Mailer addresses
the division over the war and also the disparaging of anti-war {{pg|483|484}}
protestors in the mainstream press which created a gulf between mainstream America and the anti-war movement: “from late 1967 into 1968 when Mailer wrote this book, open season on the ‘hippie’ had been tacitly declared."{{sfn|MacFarlane|2007|p=131}} Mailer works to familiarize the populace with these voices of
dissent and to humanize them. The cultural clashes Mailer depicts epitomize the volatility of the U.S. at that moment, the rips in the social fabric that were becoming obvious during the escalation of the Vietnam War.

I will also consider how this novel might have acted as a catalyst for activism
for some contemporary readers and how it worked to coalesce support for the anti-war movement, addressing those Americans who were either unsympathetic towards or even appalled by the anti-war protesters
and challenging readers to see the efficacy and patriotism of the marchers’ cause. It is difficult to gauge the novel’s effectiveness on this front, but I will
consider media coverage and popular reaction to the marchers and to the
book itself. It is in the novelistic form that Mailer shares this moment in history,
and he has said that the reading of novels “is a noble pursuit, that ideally
it profoundly changes the ways in which people perceive their
experience."{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=133}} Mailer understood the great possibility of his
novel to effect change and the opportunity he had to shape readers’ understanding
of what it meant to protest the war in Vietnam.

The political divide was so great in America in the late 1960s that Mailer may have felt obliged to explain one faction to another, to use as a didactic
tool; he was teaching about a counterculture, from which many Americans
were insulated. Scott MacFarlane measures the social turmoil of the times “at a level unseen since the Civil War. The book reading public was clamoring for insight into what was happening on the streets of America."{{sfn|MacFarlane|2007|p=133}} ''Armies'' was a new window into the anti-war movement. The mainstream
media kept Americans in the dark about the anti-war movement. Readers
were witness to Mailer’s own perspective of the counterculture which was not always exhortative: “It was the children in whom Mailer had some hope, a gloomy hope. These mad middle-class children with their lobotomies from
sin, their nihilistic embezzlement of all middle-class moral funds, their innocence,
their lust for apocalypse, their unbelievable indifference to waste."{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=44}} Mailer does not form saints out of the anti-war camp, and
one could not accuse Mailer of being an outright defender of the counterculture.
But through his intimate sketches of the activists and his own experience
as a fellow marcher, we do see images of greatness, of self-sacrifice and {{pg|484|485}}
patriotism. Most important, Mailer, as narrator/protagonist, gives Americans
outside the march a sense of what it was to be a demonstrator.

One of Mailer’s main tasks as an author is to acquaint his readers with the
character of the marchers themselves, so a primary concern of ''Armies'' is media bias as it affected the American public’s sentiments about the acts of resistance happening all around them. But the mainstream press was hawkish:
before the Tet Offensive in January of 1968, “not a single major newspaper
or television network call[ed] for the end to the war."{{sfn|Streitmatter|2001|p=197}} In fact, the mainstream media plainly opposed the anti-war effort “in the heady days early in the war when American correspondents doubled as government handmaidens, they openly condemned anti-war protesters as traitors."{{sfn|Streitmatter|1997|p=201}} This was the atmosphere in which
Mailer attempted to tell a moving tale of the anti-war movement.

Mailer renounces conventional journalism; he doesn’t trust the media to analyze the anti-war movement fairly. Media studies of the time show that
“throughout [the] various stages of escalating involvement, mainstream
American journalists supported the effort, serving as exuberant cheerleaders
for the military."{{sfn|Streitmatter|2001|p=184}} Mailer frequently points out
the unfair coverage that the press gave to the actions of the demonstrators
and how "[e]mphasis was put on every rock thrown, and a count was made of the windows broken. (There were, however, only a few.) But there was no
specific mention of The Wedge [a brutal crowd control technique, which resulted
in beating of the marchers]. Indeed, stories [of police brutality]
quickly disappeared."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=313-14}} This becomes evident as Mailer distinguishes
the reporting of mainstream press from that of the alternative
press. The alternative press (such as the ''Catholic Worker'', ''I.F. Stone’s Weekly,
''National Guardian'', and ''Ramparts'') was critical of the war going back in some
cases to the 1950s when troops were first deployed to Vietnam.{{sfn|Streitmatter|2001|p=184}}

One of the most damning charges in the book is the brutality perpetrated
against the marchers, who were for the most part peacefully protesting; some
protestors were “clubbed until they were broken and bloody."{{sfn|Zaroulis|Sullivan|1984|p=138}} The abuse was amplified by the fact that it often went unreported.
For the reports of police violence, Mailer relies upon outside sources
because he had been arrested early in the demonstration before most of the
violence occurred. Yet he gains credibility when integrating outside witnesses
and reportage into a book that was mostly reported from his standpoint,{{pg|485|486}}
and these external sources may have lent more authority to the charge that
protesters were abused. For any journalist there was difficulty in covering
something as large as the march on the Pentagon “because of the extensive
terrain in question and the rapid movements of the protestors and soldiers."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=72}} Acting as a novelist-journalist, Mailer collects varied media accounts
of the march and weaves them into the narrative; here he features
one Leftist perspective of the march, identifying the witness as “Harvey
Mayes of the English Department at Hunter”:
<blockquote>One soldier spilled the water from his canteen on the ground in order to add to the discomfort of the female demonstrator at his feet. She cursed him—understandably, I think—and shifted her body. She lost her balance and her shoulder hit the rifle at the soldier’s side. He raised the rifle, and with its butt, came down hard on the girl’s leg. The girl tried to move back but was not fast enough to avoid the billy-club of a soldier in the second row of the troops. At least four times that soldier hit her with all his force.{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=303}}</blockquote>
Mailer was obliged to portray the graphic scenes from the march which were missing in many media reports. Perhaps the stories of abuse were reported on more by the Left media because the Left journalists were among the protestors, down in the tussle, while mainstream reporters observed from a safe
distance, avoiding a potential encounter with violent police.

Mailer also gave accounts of “the [mainstream] press [who were], in the
aftermath, antagonistic to the March” and so included passages of an article from the ''New York Times'' which stated that “[i]t is difficult to report publicly the ugly and vulgar provocation of many of the militants. They spat on some
of the soldiers in the front line at the Pentagon and goaded them with the most vicious personal slander. . . . [M]any officials here are surprised that
there was not much more violence."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=313}} Notice that the ''Times'' does not mention any specific violence of the MPs. Numerous commentators condemned ''not'' the beatings meted out to the demonstrators, but the protest
itself; David Brinkley called it a “coarse, vulgar episode."{{sfn|Wells|1994|p=202–3}} However,
Maurice Isserman, one marcher, remembers the marchers for the most part as peaceful, remaining “pretty true to Gandhian principles."{{sfn|Isserman|2007|p=B15}}

In looking beyond Mailer’s collection of media accounts of the march, it{{pg|486|487}}

is clear that he wasn’t exaggerating the bias against anti-war activists. The
''New York Times'' reported that Robert McNamara felt his soldiers showed “restraint . . . under provocation,"{{sfn|Reston|1967|p=1}} and in one article the protesters
were referred to as “scum of the universe”{{sfn|Roberts|1967|p=45}}; another report called the demonstration “mass paranoia . . . elicit[ing] a great deal of foolishness."{{sfn|Baker|1967|p=45}} What the press wrote about the protestors was not always so disparaging, but rarely was the message of the marchers given much time, and this sort of mainstream coverage was the only information readily
available to the general public about the anti-war movement. Some of the first reports of the march on and the siege of the Pentagon were missing reports of police violence because the reporters went home late Saturday
night before the police began employing more militant tactics. But on Monday in another story of the march the ''New York Times'' still ignored “the bloody military sweep of early Sunday morning;” the ''Washington Post''’s Monday coverage was similar in that it “continued to emphasize the violence
of the protestors, not the defenders of the Pentagon."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=76, 78}} ''Time'' came out with its story a few days after the march on October 27 in which they marginalized the protestors as “left-wing radicals, hippies, acid
heads, and people with painted faces in bizarre costumes” while at the same time “applaud[ing] the government for its restraint."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=79–80}}

Mailer is unwilling to let the picture that the mainstream press drew of demonstrators become the only permanent record, and“he scolded the press for their lies, and their misrepresentation, for their guilt in creating a psychology over the last twenty years in the average American which made wars like Vietnam possible."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=93}} Mailer understands that the press is pivotal in a nation’s critique of its culture and policies, and he takes the press to task for their failure to cultivate an informed public. Eventually, Mailer’s ''Armies'' would stand with media accounts as a record of the event. Before ''Armies'' was published as a book in 1968, it appeared in periodicals (almost the entire issues of ''Harper’s'' and ''Commentary'' were given to this story). So
Mailer responded to the mass media’s “forest of inaccuracy” first in popular periodicals and then in book form. According to Dick Fontaine, a British filmmaker who was filming a documentary of Mailer over the weekend of
the march, “Norman remembered, with frightening accuracy, minutes and minutes, pages and pages, of the dialogues he was having with the others, let alone, of course, the brilliant descriptions of time, place and mood. . . . His
memory and interpretations of . . . [these events] are truly breathtaking.”{{pg|487|488}}

This speaks well of Mailer’s journalistic sensibilities and his hope to avoid a
forest of inaccuracies himself. To this end, it is important to recall that ''Armies''
won a Polk Award for excellence in journalism.

One of the achievements of ''Armies'' is that in it Mailer is able to designate the marchers as patriots, a far cry from the criticism that labeled them “draft
dodgers,” “communists,” and “rabble rousers.” In contrast, Mailer describes draft resisters as moral and courageous: “by handing in draft cards, these
young men were committing their future either to prison, emigration, frustration,
or at best, years where everything must be unknown, and that spoke
of a readiness to take moral leaps . . . [and a] faith in one’s ability to react with
grace."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=88}} Mailer recasts draft dodgers as draft resisters, those willing to risk their lives for peace rather than war. Furthermore, Mailer aligns the march itself with America’s long tradition of ostensibly just and triumphant empire-building conflict. He describes the March on the Pentagon as a rite of passage and connects this to a collection of American moments that could be understood as similar rites of passage, for “each generation
of Americans had forged their own rite, in the forest of the Alleghenies and the Adirondacks, at Valley Forge, at New Orleans in 1812, with Rogers and Clark or at Sutter’s Mill, at Gettysburg, the Alamo, the Klondike, the Argonne, Normandy, Pusan."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=308}} Such a comparison implies that without undergoing such crises the U.S. would not have become a sovereign republic, and so the March on the Pentagon is figured as another historic challenge for the country. This lofty rhetoric is meant to stir a reader’s patriotic sympathies, and Mailer is determined that his audience will see the marchers not as subversives but as patriots within the traditions of American democracy.

Mailer understood that “to affect consciousness is thus to shape power” and that his words were shaping people’s perception of the anti-war movement.
Even if his readers were persuaded to believe in a peaceful resolution to the Vietnam War, what would these readers do with this new consciousness,
a consciousness which was “itself a central ingredient in power”{{sfn|Miller|1990|p=394}}? It is difficult to measure how readers enact their power, but we can watch how Mailer enacts his own. He undertakes his own civil disobedience, getting arrested in hopes of gaining publicity and offering credence to the
cause of the march, and he understands that his symbolic action must be captured by the press to multiply its effect. When writing the story of ''Armies'', Mailer tracks his own movement from critic to supporter to war protester to{{pg|488|489}}

prisoner of conscience, and we see that he “feels the claims of imagination
as urgently as the claims of action,"{{sfn|Behar|1970|p=262}} and so he must both examine and act.

''Armies'' represents, for Mailer, a test of his moral strength, an examination of whether Mailer could stand behind his highest moral principles. The story of ''Armies'' offers a way for Mailer to put his philosophy into action and to answer the question, Are you willing to put your life on the line? David Wyatt calls Mailer “a man so obsessed by courage,” which is a persistent theme in Mailer’s famous essay “The White Negro” (1957).{{sfn|Wyatt|2008|p=318}} In many ways ''Armies'' is tied to all of Mailer’s preceding writing. The most obvious connection is to ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' (1967), but the themes and challenges of ''Armies'' are also indebted to ''Cannibals and Christians'' (1966) and ''The Presidential Papers'' (1963). These books variously tested the warrior in Mailer. Even his first book, ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948), plays a role in the conception of ''Armies''. Mary Dearborn claims that ''Armies'' is a recapitulation of his first novel bringing up questions of “confrontation with and the reaction to authority."{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=244}} In ''Armies'', Mailer’s critique of structures of power and his own civil disobedience stands in clear defiance of authoritarian establishments, the same authoritarian establishments which thwarted characters in his previous texts. Mailer’s working out of his own demons in this
journey from author to activist was also meant to engage the hearts and minds of his readers in the important business of opening their eyes to the truth about the war in Vietnam. But it is not just a story about Mailer or the many Mailer characters; Mailer serves as an entry to the predicament of the war in Vietnam and a people’s various ways to protest it.

Mailer admits early in the story his growing belief that his own writing about the Vietnam War is not enough, that “no project had seemed to cost
him enough,” for his writing was one thing, but action was another. And by simply writing about the Vietnam War “he had been suffering more and more in the past few years from the private conviction that he was getting a
little soft, a hint curdled."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=70–1}} This may have served as a barb at
his audience of readers, among whom surely numbered many armchair revolutionaries.
To keep from getting soft and to resist being contented with a
writer’s perspective, he had to move into action himself. He had to actually
take part in the demonstrations, to be physically, not just ideologically in
opposition to the war, but we are not meant to concentrate solely on Mailer’s own struggle. Rather, from his own story of activism he may bring about in {{pg|489|490}}

his readers a new understanding that through the act of reading one becomes
aware, but not yet ''involved'' in a cause. Readers might appreciate that having their consciousness raised was not the same as protesting the war in
their own communities, not at all the same as stepping out into the streets
to form a human protest. One had to move from words to action, from page to protest.

Mailer asks serious questions of his readers, as Alfred Kazin points out, describing him as the first “leading American peacenik and resister addressing urgent questions to his ‘army’—Are we good enough? How can we overcome
the ‘mediocrity of the middle-class middle-aged masses of the Left?’
The general shoddiness of American standards just now? The tendency of authorities to lie?”{{sfn|Kazin|1968|p=BR 1}} Mailer artfully places such questions within the
framework of a narrative, addressed not only to fellow peaceniks but also to
a popular readership. It was important that this novel travel beyond the Left community, and it did. Indeed, ''Armies'' “reestablished Mailer with a wide audience"{{sfn|Whalen-Bridge|2003|p=217}} and won both the Pulitzer Prize for General
Nonfiction and the National Book Award. And it was gaining a popular audience
(a readership made up of more than those on the Left) for this topic
that was a challenge for Mailer: “walking the parapet between the intellectual
and the popular, and Mailer with his dream of making ‘a revolution in
the consciousness of our time’ is too ambitious to settle for a minority ‘art’
audience."{{sfn|Radford|1983|p=230}} Mailer was ambitious enough to take on the challenge
of telling a story that those within the anti-war movement would rally
around and those outside would give a fair hearing.

The novel, first in serial and then in book form, was meant to prod readers to action. In fact, it is specifically the expansiveness of the novel genre that Mailer finds useful toward a moral end. Mailer understood the great
potential of the genre. In one interview he contends that “art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people. In particular,
I think the novel is at its best the most moral of the art forms because
it’s the most immediate, the most overbearing . . . It is the most
inescapable."{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=384}} Did Mailer’s readers find his story
inescapable, and if so, were they catalyzed to protest the war themselves? The
answer cannot easily be quantified. We can, however, study the way in which Norman Mailer tried to activate readers. Critics picked up on this hunger
of Mailer’s to make change, his “extra-literary hunger for things to change
and change now, in palpable ways rather than in the imaginary, alternative{{pg|490|491}}

ways in which most artist-novelists deal."{{sfn|Gilman|1968|p=27}} This book is not only
a testimony of civil disobedience but also a story which aims to engender civil disobedience in the reader.

Wherever readers stood on the political continuum, ''Armies'' invites readers
to justify events in the book with their real lives; it allows for “[r]eading
history over the edge of text,” which is a combination of “close reading and
analysis that allow us to get ‘inside’ the narrative, while at the same time we
understand that the narrators and subjects of nonfiction . . . live ‘outside’ the
narrative as well."{{sfn|Lehman|1997|p=3}} This makes for an intense reading experience,
especially if the novelist like Mailer uses his skills to capture an already fascinating
or contentious event. One other factor that might have turned contemporary
readers into implicated readers was the timeliness of the book’s
release: the march was more than mere history it was a recent event when the book was published just seven months after the event—and the controversy
over Vietnam still raged on.

In a nonfiction novel such as ''Armies''the story can take on very real manifestations,
which could lead to political action on the part of readers. A
reader could take measure of his or her own (in)action regarding the war
and choose to act out against the war. Such action is difficult to trace, but in
the case of ''Armies'', Rubin claims the novel “became the Bible of the movement”{{sfn|Manso|1985|p=461}}; Dearborn suggests that “young leftists found it an astute
analysis and were impressed by the passion Mailer brought to the work."{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=246}} However, Michael Albert and Noam Chomsky, both major figures in
the anti-war movement, didn’t feel that it made much of an impact within
the movement. Albert recalls “honestly, I doubt if anyone I knew or virtually
anyone in the movement read it, even I didn’t. My guess would be it had [a]
very very modest impact . . . and virtually none inside the movement per
se.” While it is unclear whether it affected those within the movement, it is also difficult to tell how it affected readers just becoming acquainted with the
peace movement. Dearborn indicates that those outside the movement were
touched by the novel: “across the political spectrum, readers who watched
the student movement with varying degrees of approval or censure were
made to understand that what was going on in the streets . . . was a real phenomenon
that had to be taken extremely seriously."{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=246}} Furthermore, the
Pulitzer and National Book Award, which were because of the novel, are a
sort of establishment seals of approval—proof that it had reached middle
America. Contemporary reviewers were generous with their praise. The
{{pg|491|492}}

''London Magazine'' named him “the best living writer of English prose."{{sfn|Bergonzi|1968|p=100}} Others saw ''Armies'' saw as a monumental book, “a literary act
whose significance is certain to grow."{{sfn|Gilman|1968|p=27}} One way the book could
live on was through the reactions of its readers.

Not only was ''Armies'' about politics, but the novel stood as a statement of
the relationship between literature and politics. To ignore politics, for the novelist, is an error. Mailer must speak politically, for “the separation of the
literary and political horizons is a mute acceptance of the structures through
which power is exercised."{{sfn|Schueller|1992|p=127}} Whether his novel convinced one
single person to join the anti-war cause or not, it was a necessary testimony. Simply by representing the happenings of the anti-war movement in narrative
form, Mailer made a new current in American politics. Perhaps Mailer
understood the inescapability of politics, for as an activist author he could
not “dissociate himself from the social contexts through which he speaks."{{sfn|Schueller|1992|p=125}} His story would be null without its complex entanglement with real political struggle.

A contemporary review of ''Armies'' in ''The Nation'' called it “a permanent contribution to our literature—a unique testimony to literary responsiveness and responsibility”{{sfn|Trachtenberg|1968|p=702}}; certainly, Mailer was responding to
important political phenomena that had not received sustained literary attention.
His writing about the rifts within the tumultuous New Left, the division
between Americans for and against the war, and the response of
government and the press to the anti-war movement did delineate important
political issues that needed to be aired. Mailer did not shy away from critique of the government or the media or of himself in order to tell the story of those in the anti-war movement.

Mailer’s novel represents a catalyst for social change through its introduction
of an anti-war subculture to a popular audience. Mailer speaks candidly
about his intentions: “I was trying to bring a consciousness to America
about the war in Vietnam. . . . I think the effect of the book was to make resistance to the war in Vietnam a little more human to people who were still supporting the war. So, yes, I think the book did have a political effect. Maybe it tended to strengthen the side opposed to the war in Vietnam."{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=220}} Jason Epstein recalls ''Armies'' as a book “meant to rally or produce a political reaction”{{sfn|Manso|1985|p=470}}; a strong argument can be made for the fact that Mailer meant to catalyze his readers. He attested to the disorganization
and dissension within the anti-war camp, but more vigorously{{pg|492|493}}
showed the misrepresentation, defamation, and even the physical denigration
of the activists. His argument for peace in Vietnam gained stature because he was a bona fide activist for the cause, facing arrest to further the significance of his protest. He was there, present at the march, and authenticated his action by telling the story of the march. ''The Armies of the Night'' exists as a testament to the anti-war movement and to the efficacy of civil disobedience.

===Citations===
{{reflist|20em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin}}
* {{citation
| last = Albert
| first = Michael
| title = A Referral from Noam Chomsky
| date = 10 November 2009
| publisher = Message to Katharine Westaway. E-mail.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Baker
| first = Russell
| title = Observer: Dove Antics
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 24 October 1967
| page = 45
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Behar
| first = Jack
| title = History and Fiction
| journal = NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction
| volume = 3
| issue = 3
| year = 1970
| pages = 260–265
| ref = harv
}}
*{{cite magazine
| last = Bergonzi
| first = Bernard
| title = Selected Books
| magazine = London Magazine
| date = November 1968
| pages = 98–100
| quote = Rev. of ''Cannibals and Christians'' and ''Armies of the Night,'' by Norman Mailer.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Dearborn
| first = Mary V.
| title = Mailer: A Biography
| publisher = Houghton Mifflin
| location = Boston
| year = 1999
| ref = harv
}}
* {{citation
| last = Fontaine
| first = Dick
| title = Question for Dick Fontaine
| date = 1 April 2009
| publisher = Message to Katharine Westaway. E-mail.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| editor-last = Gallup
| editor-first = George Horace
| title = Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1935–1971
| volume = 3
| publisher = Random House
| location = New York
| year = 1972
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Gilman
| first = Richard
| title = What Mailer Has Done
| magazine = The New Republic
| date = 8 June 1968
| pages = 27–31
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Isserman
| first = Maurice
| title = The Flower and the Gun
| magazine = The Chronicle of Higher Education
| date = 19 October 2007
| pages = B14–B15
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Kazin
| first = Alfred
| title = The Trouble He’s Seen
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 5 May 1968
| page = BR1
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Lehman
| first = Daniel W.
| title = Matters of Fact: Reading Nonfiction over the Edge
| publisher = Ohio State UP
| location = Columbus
| year = 1997
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = MacFarlane
| first = Scott
| title = The Hippie Narrative: A Literary Perspective on the Counterculture
| publisher = McFarland
| location = Jefferson
| year = 2007
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Mailer
| first = Norman
| title = Advertisements for Myself
| publisher = G. P. Putnam’s Sons
| location = New York
| year = 1959
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Mailer
| first = Norman
| title = Existential Aesthetics: An Interview with Norman Mailer
| others = Interview by Laura Adams
| editor-last = Lennon
| editor-first = J. Michael
| book-title = Conversations with Norman Mailer
| publisher = UP of Mississippi
| location = Jackson
| year = 1988
| pages = 207–227
| quote = Rpt. of "Existential Aesthetics: An Interview with Norman Mailer." ''Partisan Review'' 42.2 (1975): 197–214.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
|last = Mailer
| first = Norman
| chapter = Prisoner of Success: An Interview with Paul Attanasio
| editor-last = Lennon
| editor-first = J. Michael
| title = Pieces and Pontifications
| publisher = Little, Brown & Company
| location = Boston
| year = 1982
| pages = 129–136
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Manso
| first = Peter
| title = Norman Mailer: His Life and Times
| publisher = Simon and Schuster
| location = New York
| year = 1985
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Miller
| first = Joshua
| title = No Success Like Failure: Existential Politics in Norman Mailer’s ''The Armies of the Night''
| journal = Polity
| volume = 22
| issue = 3
| year = 1990
| pages = 379–396
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Radford
| first = Jean
| chapter = Norman Mailer: The True Story of an American Writer
| editor-last = Gray
| editor-first = Richard
| title = American Fiction: New Readings
| publisher = Vision Press
| location = London
| year = 1983
| pages = 222–237
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Reston
| first = James
| title = Everyone is a Loser
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 23 October 1967
| page = 1
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Roberts
| first = Gene
| title = Wallace Derides War Protesters
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 29 October 1967
| page = 45
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Schueller
| first = Malini Johar
| title = The Politics of Voice: Liberalism and Social Criticism from Franklin to Kingston
| publisher = State University of New York Press
| location = Albany
| year = 1992
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Scott
| first = Nathan A.
| title = Three American Moralists: Mailer, Bellow, Trilling
| publisher = U of Notre Dame P
| location = Notre Dame
| year = 1973
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Small
| first = Melvin
| title = Covering Dissent: The Media and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement
| publisher = Rutgers UP
| location = New Brunswick
| year = 1994
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Streitmatter
| first = Rodger
| title = Mightier Than the Sword: How the News Media Have Shaped American History
| publisher = Westview
| location = Boulder
| year = 1997
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Streitmatter
| first = Rodger
| title = Voices of Revolution: The Dissident Press in America
| publisher = Columbia UP
| location = New York
| year = 2001
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Trachtenberg
| first = Alan
| title = Mailer on the Steps of the Pentagon
| magazine = The Nation
| date = 27 May 1968
| pages = 701–702
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Wells
| first = Tom
| title = The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam
| publisher = U of California P
| location = Berkeley
| year = 1994
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Whalen-Bridge
| first = John
| chapter = Norman Mailer
| editor-first = James R.
| editor-last = Giles
| editor2-first = Wanda H.
| editor2-last = Giles
| title = American Novelists Since World War II. Seventh Series
| series = Dictionary of Literary Biography
| volume = 278
| publisher = Gale Group
| location = New York
| year = 2003
| pages = 217–232
| quote = Vol. 278 of ''Dictionary of Literary Biography''. 357 vols. to date. 1978–.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Wyatt
| first = David
| title = Living Out the Sixties
| journal = The Hopkins Review
| volume = 1
| issue = 2
| year = 2008
| pages = 315–332
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last1 = Zaroulis
| first1 = Nancy
| last2 = Sullivan
| first2 = Gerald
| title = Who Spoke Up? American Protest Against the War in Vietnam 1963–1975
| publisher = Doubleday
| location = Garden City
| year = 1984
| ref = harv
}}
{{Refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:“A Noble Pursuit”: The Armies of the Night as Outside Agitator: }}
[[Category:Miscellany (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/“A Noble Pursuit”: The Armies of the Night as Outside Agitator

2025-04-20T22:30:51Z

Chelsey.brantley: Corrected in-text citation

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{Byline|last=Westaway|first=Katharine|url=https://prmlr.us/mr07dick|abstract=One of the achievements of ''The Armies of the Night'' is that Norman Mailer is able to designate the marchers as patriots, a far cry from the criticism that labeled them “draft dodgers,” “communists,” and “rabble rousers.” Mailer aligns the march itself with America’s long tradition of ostensibly just and triumphant empire-building conflict. He describes the March on the Pentagon as a rite of passage and connects this to a collection of American moments that could be understood as similar rites of passage.}}

{{dc|dc=O|n a weekend in October of 1967,}} tens of thousands of demonstrators
amassed in Washington DC to protest the war in Vietnam. Intending ''The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History'' (1968) to record and commemorate this eventful weekend, Norman Mailer enlarged the march on the Pentagon’s meaning, working as a novelist to make it more
than a four-day set of tremors in the nation’s capital. Some consider the
march a watershed moment, “the first in a chain of events that led to Lyndon
Johnson’s decision . . . to deescalate in Vietnam."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=70}} Mailer’s
nonfiction novel carefully examines this defining event of American history.
Through Mailer’s dual role as a demonstrator and narrator, readers are provided
a rich witness to the many obstacles that were set before marchers in the form of a biased media and government officials opposed to the peace
movement, including the military and police whose physical abuse is featured in the novel.

''Armies'' is also concerned with a sweeping view of American culture ''vis-à-vis'' the march, for this is a “literary project . . . radically committed to a
rendering of the American reality”,{{sfn|Scott|1973|p=18}} and ''Armies'' becomes Mailer’s
attempt to expand upon the march’s implications for the national character.
When ''Armies'' was published, the country was divided over the war in Vietnam; according to a 1967 Gallup poll, when asked whether “the U.S. made a mistake sending troops to Vietnam” forty-six percent said yes while almost an equal amount, forty-four percent, answered no.{{sfn|Gallup|1972|p=2087}} Mailer addresses
the division over the war and also the disparaging of anti-war {{pg|483|484}}
protestors in the mainstream press which created a gulf between mainstream America and the anti-war movement: “from late 1967 into 1968 when Mailer wrote this book, open season on the ‘hippie’ had been tacitly declared."{{sfn|MacFarlane|2007|p=131}} Mailer works to familiarize the populace with these voices of
dissent and to humanize them. The cultural clashes Mailer depicts epitomize the volatility of the U.S. at that moment, the rips in the social fabric that were becoming obvious during the escalation of the Vietnam War.

I will also consider how this novel might have acted as a catalyst for activism
for some contemporary readers and how it worked to coalesce support for the anti-war movement, addressing those Americans who were either unsympathetic towards or even appalled by the anti-war protesters
and challenging readers to see the efficacy and patriotism of the marchers’ cause. It is difficult to gauge the novel’s effectiveness on this front, but I will
consider media coverage and popular reaction to the marchers and to the
book itself. It is in the novelistic form that Mailer shares this moment in history,
and he has said that the reading of novels “is a noble pursuit, that ideally
it profoundly changes the ways in which people perceive their
experience."{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=133}} Mailer understood the great possibility of his
novel to effect change and the opportunity he had to shape readers’ understanding
of what it meant to protest the war in Vietnam.

The political divide was so great in America in the late 1960s that Mailer may have felt obliged to explain one faction to another, to use as a didactic
tool; he was teaching about a counterculture, from which many Americans
were insulated. Scott MacFarlane measures the social turmoil of the times “at a level unseen since the Civil War. The book reading public was clamoring for insight into what was happening on the streets of America."{{sfn|MacFarlane|2007|p=133}} ''Armies'' was a new window into the anti-war movement. The mainstream
media kept Americans in the dark about the anti-war movement. Readers
were witness to Mailer’s own perspective of the counterculture which was not always exhortative: “It was the children in whom Mailer had some hope, a gloomy hope. These mad middle-class children with their lobotomies from
sin, their nihilistic embezzlement of all middle-class moral funds, their innocence,
their lust for apocalypse, their unbelievable indifference to waste."{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=44}} Mailer does not form saints out of the anti-war camp, and
one could not accuse Mailer of being an outright defender of the counterculture.
But through his intimate sketches of the activists and his own experience
as a fellow marcher, we do see images of greatness, of self-sacrifice and {{pg|484|485}}
patriotism. Most important, Mailer, as narrator/protagonist, gives Americans
outside the march a sense of what it was to be a demonstrator.

One of Mailer’s main tasks as an author is to acquaint his readers with the
character of the marchers themselves, so a primary concern of ''Armies'' is media bias as it affected the American public’s sentiments about the acts of resistance happening all around them. But the mainstream press was hawkish:
before the Tet Offensive in January of 1968, “not a single major newspaper
or television network call[ed] for the end to the war."{{sfn|Streitmatter|2001|p=197}} In fact, the mainstream media plainly opposed the anti-war effort “in the heady days early in the war when American correspondents doubled as government handmaidens, they openly condemned anti-war protesters as traitors."{{sfn|Streitmatter|1997|p=201}} This was the atmosphere in which
Mailer attempted to tell a moving tale of the anti-war movement.

Mailer renounces conventional journalism; he doesn’t trust the media to analyze the anti-war movement fairly. Media studies of the time show that
“throughout [the] various stages of escalating involvement, mainstream
American journalists supported the effort, serving as exuberant cheerleaders
for the military."{{sfn|Streitmatter|2001|p=184}} Mailer frequently points out
the unfair coverage that the press gave to the actions of the demonstrators
and how "[e]mphasis was put on every rock thrown, and a count was made of the windows broken. (There were, however, only a few.) But there was no
specific mention of The Wedge [a brutal crowd control technique, which resulted
in beating of the marchers]. Indeed, stories [of police brutality]
quickly disappeared."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=313-14}} This becomes evident as Mailer distinguishes
the reporting of mainstream press from that of the alternative
press. The alternative press (such as the ''Catholic Worker'', ''I.F. Stone’s Weekly,
''National Guardian'', and ''Ramparts'') was critical of the war going back in some
cases to the 1950s when troops were first deployed to Vietnam.{{sfn|Streitmatter|2001|p=184}}

One of the most damning charges in the book is the brutality perpetrated
against the marchers, who were for the most part peacefully protesting; some
protestors were “clubbed until they were broken and bloody."{{sfn|Zaroulis|Sullivan|1984|p=138}} The abuse was amplified by the fact that it often went unreported.
For the reports of police violence, Mailer relies upon outside sources
because he had been arrested early in the demonstration before most of the
violence occurred. Yet he gains credibility when integrating outside witnesses
and reportage into a book that was mostly reported from his standpoint,{{pg|485|486}}
and these external sources may have lent more authority to the charge that
protesters were abused. For any journalist there was difficulty in covering
something as large as the march on the Pentagon “because of the extensive
terrain in question and the rapid movements of the protestors and soldiers."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=72}} Acting as a novelist-journalist, Mailer collects varied media accounts
of the march and weaves them into the narrative; here he features
one Leftist perspective of the march, identifying the witness as “Harvey
Mayes of the English Department at Hunter”:
<blockquote>One soldier spilled the water from his canteen on the ground in order to add to the discomfort of the female demonstrator at his feet. She cursed him—understandably, I think—and shifted her body. She lost her balance and her shoulder hit the rifle at the soldier’s side. He raised the rifle, and with its butt, came down hard on the girl’s leg. The girl tried to move back but was not fast enough to avoid the billy-club of a soldier in the second row of the troops. At least four times that soldier hit her with all his force.{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=303}}</blockquote>
Mailer was obliged to portray the graphic scenes from the march which were missing in many media reports. Perhaps the stories of abuse were reported on more by the Left media because the Left journalists were among the protestors, down in the tussle, while mainstream reporters observed from a safe
distance, avoiding a potential encounter with violent police.

Mailer also gave accounts of “the [mainstream] press [who were], in the
aftermath, antagonistic to the March” and so included passages of an article from the ''New York Times'' which stated that “[i]t is difficult to report publicly the ugly and vulgar provocation of many of the militants. They spat on some
of the soldiers in the front line at the Pentagon and goaded them with the most vicious personal slander. . . . [M]any officials here are surprised that
there was not much more violence."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=313}} Notice that the ''Times'' does not mention any specific violence of the MPs. Numerous commentators condemned ''not'' the beatings meted out to the demonstrators, but the protest
itself; David Brinkley called it a “coarse, vulgar episode."{{sfn|Wells|1994|p=202–3}} However,
Maurice Isserman, one marcher, remembers the marchers for the most part as peaceful, remaining “pretty true to Gandhian principles."{{sfn|Isserman|2007|p=B15}}

In looking beyond Mailer’s collection of media accounts of the march, it{{pg|486|487}}

is clear that he wasn’t exaggerating the bias against anti-war activists. The
''New York Times'' reported that Robert McNamara felt his soldiers showed “restraint . . . under provocation,"{{sfn|Reston|1967|p=1}} and in one article the protesters
were referred to as “scum of the universe”{{sfn|Roberts|1967|p=45}}; another report called the demonstration “mass paranoia . . . elicit[ing] a great deal of foolishness."{{sfn|Baker|1967|p=45}} What the press wrote about the protestors was not always so disparaging, but rarely was the message of the marchers given much time, and this sort of mainstream coverage was the only information readily
available to the general public about the anti-war movement. Some of the first reports of the march on and the siege of the Pentagon were missing reports of police violence because the reporters went home late Saturday
night before the police began employing more militant tactics. But on Monday in another story of the march the ''New York Times'' still ignored “the bloody military sweep of early Sunday morning;” the ''Washington Post''’s Monday coverage was similar in that it “continued to emphasize the violence
of the protestors, not the defenders of the Pentagon."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=76, 78}} ''Time'' came out with its story a few days after the march on October 27 in which they marginalized the protestors as “left-wing radicals, hippies, acid
heads, and people with painted faces in bizarre costumes” while at the same time “applaud[ing] the government for its restraint."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=79–80}}

Mailer is unwilling to let the picture that the mainstream press drew of demonstrators become the only permanent record, and“he scolded the press for their lies, and their misrepresentation, for their guilt in creating a psychology over the last twenty years in the average American which made wars like Vietnam possible."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=93}} Mailer understands that the press is pivotal in a nation’s critique of its culture and policies, and he takes the press to task for their failure to cultivate an informed public. Eventually, Mailer’s ''Armies'' would stand with media accounts as a record of the event. Before ''Armies'' was published as a book in 1968, it appeared in periodicals (almost the entire issues of ''Harper’s'' and ''Commentary'' were given to this story). So
Mailer responded to the mass media’s “forest of inaccuracy” first in popular periodicals and then in book form. According to Dick Fontaine, a British filmmaker who was filming a documentary of Mailer over the weekend of
the march, “Norman remembered, with frightening accuracy, minutes and minutes, pages and pages, of the dialogues he was having with the others, let alone, of course, the brilliant descriptions of time, place and mood. . . . His
memory and interpretations of . . . [these events] are truly breathtaking.”{{pg|487|488}}

This speaks well of Mailer’s journalistic sensibilities and his hope to avoid a
forest of inaccuracies himself. To this end, it is important to recall that ''Armies''
won a Polk Award for excellence in journalism.

One of the achievements of ''Armies'' is that in it Mailer is able to designate the marchers as patriots, a far cry from the criticism that labeled them “draft
dodgers,” “communists,” and “rabble rousers.” In contrast, Mailer describes draft resisters as moral and courageous: “by handing in draft cards, these
young men were committing their future either to prison, emigration, frustration,
or at best, years where everything must be unknown, and that spoke
of a readiness to take moral leaps . . . [and a] faith in one’s ability to react with
grace."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=88}} Mailer recasts draft dodgers as draft resisters, those willing to risk their lives for peace rather than war. Furthermore, Mailer aligns the march itself with America’s long tradition of ostensibly just and triumphant empire-building conflict. He describes the March on the Pentagon as a rite of passage and connects this to a collection of American moments that could be understood as similar rites of passage, for “each generation
of Americans had forged their own rite, in the forest of the Alleghenies and the Adirondacks, at Valley Forge, at New Orleans in 1812, with Rogers and Clark or at Sutter’s Mill, at Gettysburg, the Alamo, the Klondike, the Argonne, Normandy, Pusan."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=308}} Such a comparison implies that without undergoing such crises the U.S. would not have become a sovereign republic, and so the March on the Pentagon is figured as another historic challenge for the country. This lofty rhetoric is meant to stir a reader’s patriotic sympathies, and Mailer is determined that his audience will see the marchers not as subversives but as patriots within the traditions of American democracy.

Mailer understood that “to affect consciousness is thus to shape power” and that his words were shaping people’s perception of the anti-war movement.
Even if his readers were persuaded to believe in a peaceful resolution to the Vietnam War, what would these readers do with this new consciousness,
a consciousness which was “itself a central ingredient in power”{{sfn|Miller|1990|p=394}}? It is difficult to measure how readers enact their power, but we can watch how Mailer enacts his own. He undertakes his own civil disobedience, getting arrested in hopes of gaining publicity and offering credence to the
cause of the march, and he understands that his symbolic action must be captured by the press to multiply its effect. When writing the story of ''Armies'', Mailer tracks his own movement from critic to supporter to war protester to{{pg|488|489}}

prisoner of conscience, and we see that he “feels the claims of imagination
as urgently as the claims of action,"{{sfn|Behar|1970|p=262}} and so he must both examine and act.

''Armies'' represents, for Mailer, a test of his moral strength, an examination of whether Mailer could stand behind his highest moral principles. The story of ''Armies'' offers a way for Mailer to put his philosophy into action and to answer the question, Are you willing to put your life on the line? David Wyatt calls Mailer “a man so obsessed by courage,” which is a persistent theme in Mailer’s famous essay “The White Negro” (1957).{{sfn|Wyatt|2008|p=318}} In many ways ''Armies'' is tied to all of Mailer’s preceding writing. The most obvious connection is to ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' (1967), but the themes and challenges of ''Armies'' are also indebted to ''Cannibals and Christians'' (1966) and ''The Presidential Papers'' (1963). These books variously tested the warrior in Mailer. Even his first book, ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948), plays a role in the conception of ''Armies''. Mary Dearborn claims that ''Armies'' is a recapitulation of his first novel bringing up questions of “confrontation with and the reaction to authority."{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=244}} In ''Armies'', Mailer’s critique of structures of power and his own civil disobedience stands in clear defiance of authoritarian establishments, the same authoritarian establishments which thwarted characters in his previous texts. Mailer’s working out of his own demons in this
journey from author to activist was also meant to engage the hearts and minds of his readers in the important business of opening their eyes to the truth about the war in Vietnam. But it is not just a story about Mailer or the many Mailer characters; Mailer serves as an entry to the predicament of the war in Vietnam and a people’s various ways to protest it.

Mailer admits early in the story his growing belief that his own writing about the Vietnam War is not enough, that “no project had seemed to cost
him enough,” for his writing was one thing, but action was another. And by simply writing about the Vietnam War “he had been suffering more and more in the past few years from the private conviction that he was getting a
little soft, a hint curdled."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=70–1}} This may have served as a barb at
his audience of readers, among whom surely numbered many armchair revolutionaries.
To keep from getting soft and to resist being contented with a
writer’s perspective, he had to move into action himself. He had to actually
take part in the demonstrations, to be physically, not just ideologically in
opposition to the war, but we are not meant to concentrate solely on Mailer’s own struggle. Rather, from his own story of activism he may bring about in {{pg|489|490}}

his readers a new understanding that through the act of reading one becomes
aware, but not yet ''involved'' in a cause. Readers might appreciate that having their consciousness raised was not the same as protesting the war in
their own communities, not at all the same as stepping out into the streets
to form a human protest. One had to move from words to action, from page to protest.

Mailer asks serious questions of his readers, as Alfred Kazin points out, describing him as the first “leading American peacenik and resister addressing urgent questions to his ‘army’—Are we good enough? How can we overcome
the ‘mediocrity of the middle-class middle-aged masses of the Left?’
The general shoddiness of American standards just now? The tendency of authorities to lie?”{{sfn|Kazin|1968|p=BR 1}} Mailer artfully places such questions within the
framework of a narrative, addressed not only to fellow peaceniks but also to
a popular readership. It was important that this novel travel beyond the Left community, and it did. Indeed, ''Armies'' “reestablished Mailer with a wide audience"{{sfn|Whalen-Bridge|2003|p=217}} and won both the Pulitzer Prize for General
Nonfiction and the National Book Award. And it was gaining a popular audience
(a readership made up of more than those on the Left) for this topic
that was a challenge for Mailer: “walking the parapet between the intellectual
and the popular, and Mailer with his dream of making ‘a revolution in
the consciousness of our time’ is too ambitious to settle for a minority ‘art’
audience."{{sfn|Radford|1983|p=230}} Mailer was ambitious enough to take on the challenge
of telling a story that those within the anti-war movement would rally
around and those outside would give a fair hearing.

The novel, first in serial and then in book form, was meant to prod readers to action. In fact, it is specifically the expansiveness of the novel genre that Mailer finds useful toward a moral end. Mailer understood the great
potential of the genre. In one interview he contends that “art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people. In particular,
I think the novel is at its best the most moral of the art forms because
it’s the most immediate, the most overbearing . . . It is the most
inescapable."{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=384}} Did Mailer’s readers find his story
inescapable, and if so, were they catalyzed to protest the war themselves? The
answer cannot easily be quantified. We can, however, study the way in which Norman Mailer tried to activate readers. Critics picked up on this hunger
of Mailer’s to make change, his “extra-literary hunger for things to change
and change now, in palpable ways rather than in the imaginary, alternative{{pg|490|491}}

ways in which most artist-novelists deal."{{sfn|Gilman|1968|p=27}} This book is not only
a testimony of civil disobedience but also a story which aims to engender civil disobedience in the reader.

Wherever readers stood on the political continuum, ''Armies'' invites readers
to justify events in the book with their real lives; it allows for “[r]eading
history over the edge of text,” which is a combination of “close reading and
analysis that allow us to get ‘inside’ the narrative, while at the same time we
understand that the narrators and subjects of nonfiction . . . live ‘outside’ the
narrative as well."{{sfn|Lehman|1997|p=3}} This makes for an intense reading experience,
especially if the novelist like Mailer uses his skills to capture an already fascinating
or contentious event. One other factor that might have turned contemporary
readers into implicated readers was the timeliness of the book’s
release: the march was more than mere history it was a recent event when the book was published just seven months after the event—and the controversy
over Vietnam still raged on.

In a nonfiction novel such as ''Armies''the story can take on very real manifestations,
which could lead to political action on the part of readers. A
reader could take measure of his or her own (in)action regarding the war
and choose to act out against the war. Such action is difficult to trace, but in
the case of ''Armies'', Rubin claims the novel “became the Bible of the movement”{{sfn|Manso|1985|p=461}}; Dearborn suggests that “young leftists found it an astute
analysis and were impressed by the passion Mailer brought to the work."{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=246}} However, Michael Albert and Noam Chomsky, both major figures in
the anti-war movement, didn’t feel that it made much of an impact within
the movement. Albert recalls “honestly, I doubt if anyone I knew or virtually
anyone in the movement read it, even I didn’t. My guess would be it had [a]
very very modest impact . . . and virtually none inside the movement per
se.” While it is unclear whether it affected those within the movement, it is also difficult to tell how it affected readers just becoming acquainted with the
peace movement. Dearborn indicates that those outside the movement were
touched by the novel: “across the political spectrum, readers who watched
the student movement with varying degrees of approval or censure were
made to understand that what was going on in the streets . . . was a real phenomenon
that had to be taken extremely seriously."{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=246}} Furthermore, the
Pulitzer and National Book Award, which were because of the novel, are a
sort of establishment seals of approval—proof that it had reached middle
America. Contemporary reviewers were generous with their praise. The
{{pg|491|492}}

''London Magazine'' named him “the best living writer of English prose."{{sfn|Bergonzi|1968|p=100}} Others saw ''Armies'' saw as a monumental book, “a literary act
whose significance is certain to grow."{{sfn|Gilman|1968|p=27}} One way the book could
live on was through the reactions of its readers.

Not only was ''Armies'' about politics, but the novel stood as a statement of
the relationship between literature and politics. To ignore politics, for the novelist, is an error. Mailer must speak politically, for “the separation of the
literary and political horizons is a mute acceptance of the structures through
which power is exercised."{{sfn|Schueller|1992|p=127}} Whether his novel convinced one
single person to join the anti-war cause or not, it was a necessary testimony. Simply by representing the happenings of the anti-war movement in narrative
form, Mailer made a new current in American politics. Perhaps Mailer
understood the inescapability of politics, for as an activist author he could
not “dissociate himself from the social contexts through which he speaks."{{sfn|Schueller|1992|p=125}} His story would be null without its complex entanglement with real political struggle.

A contemporary review of ''Armies'' in ''The Nation'' called it “a permanent contribution to our literature—a unique testimony to literary responsiveness and responsibility”{{sfn|Trachtenberg|1968|p=702}}; certainly, Mailer was responding to
important political phenomena that had not received sustained literary attention.
His writing about the rifts within the tumultuous New Left, the division
between Americans for and against the war, and the response of
government and the press to the anti-war movement did delineate important
political issues that needed to be aired. Mailer did not shy away from critique of the government or the media or of himself in order to tell the story of those in the anti-war movement.

Mailer’s novel represents a catalyst for social change through its introduction
of an anti-war subculture to a popular audience. Mailer speaks candidly
about his intentions: “I was trying to bring a consciousness to America
about the war in Vietnam. . . . I think the effect of the book was to make resistance to the war in Vietnam a little more human to people who were still supporting the war. So, yes, I think the book did have a political effect. Maybe it tended to strengthen the side opposed to the war in Vietnam."{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=220}} Jason Epstein recalls ''Armies'' as a book “meant to rally or produce a political reaction”{{sfn|Manso|1985|p=470}}; a strong argument can be made for the fact that Mailer meant to catalyze his readers. He attested to the disorganization
and dissension within the anti-war camp, but more vigorously{{pg|492|493}}
showed the misrepresentation, defamation, and even the physical denigration
of the activists. His argument for peace in Vietnam gained stature because he was a bona fide activist for the cause, facing arrest to further the significance of his protest. He was there, present at the march, and authenticated his action by telling the story of the march. ''The Armies of the Night'' exists as a testament to the anti-war movement and to the efficacy of civil disobedience.

===Citations===
{{reflist|20em}}

===Works Cited===
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| ref = harv
}}
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| ref = harv
}}
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| ref = harv
}}
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}}
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* {{cite book
| last = Whalen-Bridge
| first = John
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| editor-first = James R.
| editor-last = Giles
| editor2-first = Wanda H.
| editor2-last = Giles
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| series = Dictionary of Literary Biography
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}}
{{Refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:“A Noble Pursuit”: The Armies of the Night as Outside Agitator: }}
[[Category:Miscellany (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/“A Noble Pursuit”: The Armies of the Night as Outside Agitator

2025-04-20T22:28:16Z

Chelsey.brantley: Corrected in-text citation code and minor errors

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{{Byline|last=Westaway|first=Katharine|url=https://prmlr.us/mr07dick|abstract=One of the achievements of ''The Armies of the Night'' is that Norman Mailer is able to designate the marchers as patriots, a far cry from the criticism that labeled them “draft dodgers,” “communists,” and “rabble rousers.” Mailer aligns the march itself with America’s long tradition of ostensibly just and triumphant empire-building conflict. He describes the March on the Pentagon as a rite of passage and connects this to a collection of American moments that could be understood as similar rites of passage.}}

{{dc|dc=O|n a weekend in October of 1967,}} tens of thousands of demonstrators
amassed in Washington DC to protest the war in Vietnam. Intending ''The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History'' (1968) to record and commemorate this eventful weekend, Norman Mailer enlarged the march on the Pentagon’s meaning, working as a novelist to make it more
than a four-day set of tremors in the nation’s capital. Some consider the
march a watershed moment, “the first in a chain of events that led to Lyndon
Johnson’s decision . . . to deescalate in Vietnam."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=70}} Mailer’s
nonfiction novel carefully examines this defining event of American history.
Through Mailer’s dual role as a demonstrator and narrator, readers are provided
a rich witness to the many obstacles that were set before marchers in the form of a biased media and government officials opposed to the peace
movement, including the military and police whose physical abuse is featured in the novel.

''Armies'' is also concerned with a sweeping view of American culture ''vis-à-vis'' the march, for this is a “literary project . . . radically committed to a
rendering of the American reality”,{{sfn|Scott|1973|p=18}} and ''Armies'' becomes Mailer’s
attempt to expand upon the march’s implications for the national character.
When ''Armies'' was published, the country was divided over the war in Vietnam; according to a 1967 Gallup poll, when asked whether “the U.S. made a mistake sending troops to Vietnam” forty-six percent said yes while almost an equal amount, forty-four percent, answered no.{{sfn|Gallup|1972|p=2087}} Mailer addresses
the division over the war and also the disparaging of anti-war {{pg|483|484}}
protestors in the mainstream press which created a gulf between mainstream America and the anti-war movement: “from late 1967 into 1968 when Mailer wrote this book, open season on the ‘hippie’ had been tacitly declared."{{sfn|MacFarlane|2007|p=131}} Mailer works to familiarize the populace with these voices of
dissent and to humanize them. The cultural clashes Mailer depicts epitomize the volatility of the U.S. at that moment, the rips in the social fabric that were becoming obvious during the escalation of the Vietnam War.

I will also consider how this novel might have acted as a catalyst for activism
for some contemporary readers and how it worked to coalesce support for the anti-war movement, addressing those Americans who were either unsympathetic towards or even appalled by the anti-war protesters
and challenging readers to see the efficacy and patriotism of the marchers’ cause. It is difficult to gauge the novel’s effectiveness on this front, but I will
consider media coverage and popular reaction to the marchers and to the
book itself. It is in the novelistic form that Mailer shares this moment in history,
and he has said that the reading of novels “is a noble pursuit, that ideally
it profoundly changes the ways in which people perceive their
experience."{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=133}} Mailer understood the great possibility of his
novel to effect change and the opportunity he had to shape readers’ understanding
of what it meant to protest the war in Vietnam.

The political divide was so great in America in the late 1960s that Mailer may have felt obliged to explain one faction to another, to use as a didactic
tool; he was teaching about a counterculture, from which many Americans
were insulated. Scott MacFarlane measures the social turmoil of the times “at a level unseen since the Civil War. The book reading public was clamoring for insight into what was happening on the streets of America."{{sfn|MacFarlane|2007|p=133}} ''Armies'' was a new window into the anti-war movement. The mainstream
media kept Americans in the dark about the anti-war movement. Readers
were witness to Mailer’s own perspective of the counterculture which was not always exhortative: “It was the children in whom Mailer had some hope, a gloomy hope. These mad middle-class children with their lobotomies from
sin, their nihilistic embezzlement of all middle-class moral funds, their innocence,
their lust for apocalypse, their unbelievable indifference to waste."{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=44}} Mailer does not form saints out of the anti-war camp, and
one could not accuse Mailer of being an outright defender of the counterculture.
But through his intimate sketches of the activists and his own experience
as a fellow marcher, we do see images of greatness, of self-sacrifice and {{pg|484|485}}
patriotism. Most important, Mailer, as narrator/protagonist, gives Americans
outside the march a sense of what it was to be a demonstrator.

One of Mailer’s main tasks as an author is to acquaint his readers with the
character of the marchers themselves, so a primary concern of ''Armies'' is media bias as it affected the American public’s sentiments about the acts of resistance happening all around them. But the mainstream press was hawkish:
before the Tet Offensive in January of 1968, “not a single major newspaper
or television network call[ed] for the end to the war."{{sfn|Streitmatter|2001|p=197}} In fact, the mainstream media plainly opposed the anti-war effort “in the heady days early in the war when American correspondents doubled as government handmaidens, they openly condemned anti-war protesters as traitors."{{sfn|Streitmatter|1997|p=201}} This was the atmosphere in which
Mailer attempted to tell a moving tale of the anti-war movement.

Mailer renounces conventional journalism; he doesn’t trust the media to analyze the anti-war movement fairly. Media studies of the time show that
“throughout [the] various stages of escalating involvement, mainstream
American journalists supported the effort, serving as exuberant cheerleaders
for the military."{{sfn|Streitmatter|2001|p=184}} Mailer frequently points out
the unfair coverage that the press gave to the actions of the demonstrators
and how "[e]mphasis was put on every rock thrown, and a count was made of the windows broken. (There were, however, only a few.) But there was no
specific mention of The Wedge [a brutal crowd control technique, which resulted
in beating of the marchers]. Indeed, stories [of police brutality]
quickly disappeared."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=313-14}} This becomes evident as Mailer distinguishes
the reporting of mainstream press from that of the alternative
press. The alternative press (such as the ''Catholic Worker'', ''I.F. Stone’s Weekly,
''National Guardian'', and ''Ramparts'') was critical of the war going back in some
cases to the 1950s when troops were first deployed to Vietnam.{{sfn|Streitmatter|2001|p=184}}

One of the most damning charges in the book is the brutality perpetrated
against the marchers, who were for the most part peacefully protesting; some
protestors were “clubbed until they were broken and bloody."{{sfn|Zaroulis and Sullivan|1984|p=138}} The abuse was amplified by the fact that it often went unreported.
For the reports of police violence, Mailer relies upon outside sources
because he had been arrested early in the demonstration before most of the
violence occurred. Yet he gains credibility when integrating outside witnesses
and reportage into a book that was mostly reported from his standpoint,{{pg|485|486}}
and these external sources may have lent more authority to the charge that
protesters were abused. For any journalist there was difficulty in covering
something as large as the march on the Pentagon “because of the extensive
terrain in question and the rapid movements of the protestors and soldiers."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=72}} Acting as a novelist-journalist, Mailer collects varied media accounts
of the march and weaves them into the narrative; here he features
one Leftist perspective of the march, identifying the witness as “Harvey
Mayes of the English Department at Hunter”:
<blockquote>One soldier spilled the water from his canteen on the ground in order to add to the discomfort of the female demonstrator at his feet. She cursed him—understandably, I think—and shifted her body. She lost her balance and her shoulder hit the rifle at the soldier’s side. He raised the rifle, and with its butt, came down hard on the girl’s leg. The girl tried to move back but was not fast enough to avoid the billy-club of a soldier in the second row of the troops. At least four times that soldier hit her with all his force.{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=303}}</blockquote>
Mailer was obliged to portray the graphic scenes from the march which were missing in many media reports. Perhaps the stories of abuse were reported on more by the Left media because the Left journalists were among the protestors, down in the tussle, while mainstream reporters observed from a safe
distance, avoiding a potential encounter with violent police.

Mailer also gave accounts of “the [mainstream] press [who were], in the
aftermath, antagonistic to the March” and so included passages of an article from the ''New York Times'' which stated that “[i]t is difficult to report publicly the ugly and vulgar provocation of many of the militants. They spat on some
of the soldiers in the front line at the Pentagon and goaded them with the most vicious personal slander. . . . [M]any officials here are surprised that
there was not much more violence."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=313}} Notice that the ''Times'' does not mention any specific violence of the MPs. Numerous commentators condemned ''not'' the beatings meted out to the demonstrators, but the protest
itself; David Brinkley called it a “coarse, vulgar episode."{{sfn|Wells|1994|p=202–3}} However,
Maurice Isserman, one marcher, remembers the marchers for the most part as peaceful, remaining “pretty true to Gandhian principles."{{sfn|Isserman|2007|p=B15}}

In looking beyond Mailer’s collection of media accounts of the march, it{{pg|486|487}}

is clear that he wasn’t exaggerating the bias against anti-war activists. The
''New York Times'' reported that Robert McNamara felt his soldiers showed “restraint . . . under provocation,"{{sfn|Reston|1967|p=1}} and in one article the protesters
were referred to as “scum of the universe”{{sfn|Roberts|1967|p=45}}; another report called the demonstration “mass paranoia . . . elicit[ing] a great deal of foolishness."{{sfn|Baker|1967|p=45}} What the press wrote about the protestors was not always so disparaging, but rarely was the message of the marchers given much time, and this sort of mainstream coverage was the only information readily
available to the general public about the anti-war movement. Some of the first reports of the march on and the siege of the Pentagon were missing reports of police violence because the reporters went home late Saturday
night before the police began employing more militant tactics. But on Monday in another story of the march the ''New York Times'' still ignored “the bloody military sweep of early Sunday morning;” the ''Washington Post''’s Monday coverage was similar in that it “continued to emphasize the violence
of the protestors, not the defenders of the Pentagon."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=76, 78}} ''Time'' came out with its story a few days after the march on October 27 in which they marginalized the protestors as “left-wing radicals, hippies, acid
heads, and people with painted faces in bizarre costumes” while at the same time “applaud[ing] the government for its restraint."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=79–80}}

Mailer is unwilling to let the picture that the mainstream press drew of demonstrators become the only permanent record, and“he scolded the press for their lies, and their misrepresentation, for their guilt in creating a psychology over the last twenty years in the average American which made wars like Vietnam possible."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=93}} Mailer understands that the press is pivotal in a nation’s critique of its culture and policies, and he takes the press to task for their failure to cultivate an informed public. Eventually, Mailer’s ''Armies'' would stand with media accounts as a record of the event. Before ''Armies'' was published as a book in 1968, it appeared in periodicals (almost the entire issues of ''Harper’s'' and ''Commentary'' were given to this story). So
Mailer responded to the mass media’s “forest of inaccuracy” first in popular periodicals and then in book form. According to Dick Fontaine, a British filmmaker who was filming a documentary of Mailer over the weekend of
the march, “Norman remembered, with frightening accuracy, minutes and minutes, pages and pages, of the dialogues he was having with the others, let alone, of course, the brilliant descriptions of time, place and mood. . . . His
memory and interpretations of . . . [these events] are truly breathtaking.”{{pg|487|488}}

This speaks well of Mailer’s journalistic sensibilities and his hope to avoid a
forest of inaccuracies himself. To this end, it is important to recall that ''Armies''
won a Polk Award for excellence in journalism.

One of the achievements of ''Armies'' is that in it Mailer is able to designate the marchers as patriots, a far cry from the criticism that labeled them “draft
dodgers,” “communists,” and “rabble rousers.” In contrast, Mailer describes draft resisters as moral and courageous: “by handing in draft cards, these
young men were committing their future either to prison, emigration, frustration,
or at best, years where everything must be unknown, and that spoke
of a readiness to take moral leaps . . . [and a] faith in one’s ability to react with
grace."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=88}} Mailer recasts draft dodgers as draft resisters, those willing to risk their lives for peace rather than war. Furthermore, Mailer aligns the march itself with America’s long tradition of ostensibly just and triumphant empire-building conflict. He describes the March on the Pentagon as a rite of passage and connects this to a collection of American moments that could be understood as similar rites of passage, for “each generation
of Americans had forged their own rite, in the forest of the Alleghenies and the Adirondacks, at Valley Forge, at New Orleans in 1812, with Rogers and Clark or at Sutter’s Mill, at Gettysburg, the Alamo, the Klondike, the Argonne, Normandy, Pusan."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=308}} Such a comparison implies that without undergoing such crises the U.S. would not have become a sovereign republic, and so the March on the Pentagon is figured as another historic challenge for the country. This lofty rhetoric is meant to stir a reader’s patriotic sympathies, and Mailer is determined that his audience will see the marchers not as subversives but as patriots within the traditions of American democracy.

Mailer understood that “to affect consciousness is thus to shape power” and that his words were shaping people’s perception of the anti-war movement.
Even if his readers were persuaded to believe in a peaceful resolution to the Vietnam War, what would these readers do with this new consciousness,
a consciousness which was “itself a central ingredient in power”{{sfn|Miller|1990|p=394}}? It is difficult to measure how readers enact their power, but we can watch how Mailer enacts his own. He undertakes his own civil disobedience, getting arrested in hopes of gaining publicity and offering credence to the
cause of the march, and he understands that his symbolic action must be captured by the press to multiply its effect. When writing the story of ''Armies'', Mailer tracks his own movement from critic to supporter to war protester to{{pg|488|489}}

prisoner of conscience, and we see that he “feels the claims of imagination
as urgently as the claims of action,"{{sfn|Behar|1970|p=262}} and so he must both examine and act.

''Armies'' represents, for Mailer, a test of his moral strength, an examination of whether Mailer could stand behind his highest moral principles. The story of ''Armies'' offers a way for Mailer to put his philosophy into action and to answer the question, Are you willing to put your life on the line? David Wyatt calls Mailer “a man so obsessed by courage,” which is a persistent theme in Mailer’s famous essay “The White Negro” (1957).{{sfn|Wyatt|2008|p=318}} In many ways ''Armies'' is tied to all of Mailer’s preceding writing. The most obvious connection is to ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' (1967), but the themes and challenges of ''Armies'' are also indebted to ''Cannibals and Christians'' (1966) and ''The Presidential Papers'' (1963). These books variously tested the warrior in Mailer. Even his first book, ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948), plays a role in the conception of ''Armies''. Mary Dearborn claims that ''Armies'' is a recapitulation of his first novel bringing up questions of “confrontation with and the reaction to authority."{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=244}} In ''Armies'', Mailer’s critique of structures of power and his own civil disobedience stands in clear defiance of authoritarian establishments, the same authoritarian establishments which thwarted characters in his previous texts. Mailer’s working out of his own demons in this
journey from author to activist was also meant to engage the hearts and minds of his readers in the important business of opening their eyes to the truth about the war in Vietnam. But it is not just a story about Mailer or the many Mailer characters; Mailer serves as an entry to the predicament of the war in Vietnam and a people’s various ways to protest it.

Mailer admits early in the story his growing belief that his own writing about the Vietnam War is not enough, that “no project had seemed to cost
him enough,” for his writing was one thing, but action was another. And by simply writing about the Vietnam War “he had been suffering more and more in the past few years from the private conviction that he was getting a
little soft, a hint curdled."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=70–1}} This may have served as a barb at
his audience of readers, among whom surely numbered many armchair revolutionaries.
To keep from getting soft and to resist being contented with a
writer’s perspective, he had to move into action himself. He had to actually
take part in the demonstrations, to be physically, not just ideologically in
opposition to the war, but we are not meant to concentrate solely on Mailer’s own struggle. Rather, from his own story of activism he may bring about in {{pg|489|490}}

his readers a new understanding that through the act of reading one becomes
aware, but not yet ''involved'' in a cause. Readers might appreciate that having their consciousness raised was not the same as protesting the war in
their own communities, not at all the same as stepping out into the streets
to form a human protest. One had to move from words to action, from page to protest.

Mailer asks serious questions of his readers, as Alfred Kazin points out, describing him as the first “leading American peacenik and resister addressing urgent questions to his ‘army’—Are we good enough? How can we overcome
the ‘mediocrity of the middle-class middle-aged masses of the Left?’
The general shoddiness of American standards just now? The tendency of authorities to lie?”{{sfn|Kazin|1968|p=BR 1}} Mailer artfully places such questions within the
framework of a narrative, addressed not only to fellow peaceniks but also to
a popular readership. It was important that this novel travel beyond the Left community, and it did. Indeed, ''Armies'' “reestablished Mailer with a wide audience"{{sfn|Whalen-Bridge|2003|p=217}} and won both the Pulitzer Prize for General
Nonfiction and the National Book Award. And it was gaining a popular audience
(a readership made up of more than those on the Left) for this topic
that was a challenge for Mailer: “walking the parapet between the intellectual
and the popular, and Mailer with his dream of making ‘a revolution in
the consciousness of our time’ is too ambitious to settle for a minority ‘art’
audience."{{sfn|Radford|1983|p=230}} Mailer was ambitious enough to take on the challenge
of telling a story that those within the anti-war movement would rally
around and those outside would give a fair hearing.

The novel, first in serial and then in book form, was meant to prod readers to action. In fact, it is specifically the expansiveness of the novel genre that Mailer finds useful toward a moral end. Mailer understood the great
potential of the genre. In one interview he contends that “art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people. In particular,
I think the novel is at its best the most moral of the art forms because
it’s the most immediate, the most overbearing . . . It is the most
inescapable."{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=384}} Did Mailer’s readers find his story
inescapable, and if so, were they catalyzed to protest the war themselves? The
answer cannot easily be quantified. We can, however, study the way in which Norman Mailer tried to activate readers. Critics picked up on this hunger
of Mailer’s to make change, his “extra-literary hunger for things to change
and change now, in palpable ways rather than in the imaginary, alternative{{pg|490|491}}

ways in which most artist-novelists deal."{{sfn|Gilman|1968|p=27}} This book is not only
a testimony of civil disobedience but also a story which aims to engender civil disobedience in the reader.

Wherever readers stood on the political continuum, ''Armies'' invites readers
to justify events in the book with their real lives; it allows for “[r]eading
history over the edge of text,” which is a combination of “close reading and
analysis that allow us to get ‘inside’ the narrative, while at the same time we
understand that the narrators and subjects of nonfiction . . . live ‘outside’ the
narrative as well."{{sfn|Lehman|1997|p=3}} This makes for an intense reading experience,
especially if the novelist like Mailer uses his skills to capture an already fascinating
or contentious event. One other factor that might have turned contemporary
readers into implicated readers was the timeliness of the book’s
release: the march was more than mere history it was a recent event when the book was published just seven months after the event—and the controversy
over Vietnam still raged on.

In a nonfiction novel such as ''Armies''the story can take on very real manifestations,
which could lead to political action on the part of readers. A
reader could take measure of his or her own (in)action regarding the war
and choose to act out against the war. Such action is difficult to trace, but in
the case of ''Armies'', Rubin claims the novel “became the Bible of the movement”{{sfn|Manso|1985|p=461}}; Dearborn suggests that “young leftists found it an astute
analysis and were impressed by the passion Mailer brought to the work."{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=246}} However, Michael Albert and Noam Chomsky, both major figures in
the anti-war movement, didn’t feel that it made much of an impact within
the movement. Albert recalls “honestly, I doubt if anyone I knew or virtually
anyone in the movement read it, even I didn’t. My guess would be it had [a]
very very modest impact . . . and virtually none inside the movement per
se.” While it is unclear whether it affected those within the movement, it is also difficult to tell how it affected readers just becoming acquainted with the
peace movement. Dearborn indicates that those outside the movement were
touched by the novel: “across the political spectrum, readers who watched
the student movement with varying degrees of approval or censure were
made to understand that what was going on in the streets . . . was a real phenomenon
that had to be taken extremely seriously."{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=246}} Furthermore, the
Pulitzer and National Book Award, which were because of the novel, are a
sort of establishment seals of approval—proof that it had reached middle
America. Contemporary reviewers were generous with their praise. The
{{pg|491|492}}

''London Magazine'' named him “the best living writer of English prose."{{sfn|Bergonzi|1968|p=100}} Others saw ''Armies'' saw as a monumental book, “a literary act
whose significance is certain to grow."{{sfn|Gilman|1968|p=27}} One way the book could
live on was through the reactions of its readers.

Not only was ''Armies'' about politics, but the novel stood as a statement of
the relationship between literature and politics. To ignore politics, for the novelist, is an error. Mailer must speak politically, for “the separation of the
literary and political horizons is a mute acceptance of the structures through
which power is exercised."{{sfn|Schueller|1992|p=127}} Whether his novel convinced one
single person to join the anti-war cause or not, it was a necessary testimony. Simply by representing the happenings of the anti-war movement in narrative
form, Mailer made a new current in American politics. Perhaps Mailer
understood the inescapability of politics, for as an activist author he could
not “dissociate himself from the social contexts through which he speaks."{{sfn|Schueller|1992|p=125}} His story would be null without its complex entanglement with real political struggle.

A contemporary review of ''Armies'' in ''The Nation'' called it “a permanent contribution to our literature—a unique testimony to literary responsiveness and responsibility”{{sfn|Trachtenberg|1968|p=702}}; certainly, Mailer was responding to
important political phenomena that had not received sustained literary attention.
His writing about the rifts within the tumultuous New Left, the division
between Americans for and against the war, and the response of
government and the press to the anti-war movement did delineate important
political issues that needed to be aired. Mailer did not shy away from critique of the government or the media or of himself in order to tell the story of those in the anti-war movement.

Mailer’s novel represents a catalyst for social change through its introduction
of an anti-war subculture to a popular audience. Mailer speaks candidly
about his intentions: “I was trying to bring a consciousness to America
about the war in Vietnam. . . . I think the effect of the book was to make resistance to the war in Vietnam a little more human to people who were still supporting the war. So, yes, I think the book did have a political effect. Maybe it tended to strengthen the side opposed to the war in Vietnam."{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=220}} Jason Epstein recalls ''Armies'' as a book “meant to rally or produce a political reaction”{{sfn|Manso|1985|p=470}}; a strong argument can be made for the fact that Mailer meant to catalyze his readers. He attested to the disorganization
and dissension within the anti-war camp, but more vigorously{{pg|492|493}}
showed the misrepresentation, defamation, and even the physical denigration
of the activists. His argument for peace in Vietnam gained stature because he was a bona fide activist for the cause, facing arrest to further the significance of his protest. He was there, present at the march, and authenticated his action by telling the story of the march. ''The Armies of the Night'' exists as a testament to the anti-war movement and to the efficacy of civil disobedience.

===Citations===
{{reflist|20em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin}}
* {{citation
| last = Albert
| first = Michael
| title = A Referral from Noam Chomsky
| date = 10 November 2009
| publisher = Message to Katharine Westaway. E-mail.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Baker
| first = Russell
| title = Observer: Dove Antics
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 24 October 1967
| page = 45
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Behar
| first = Jack
| title = History and Fiction
| journal = NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction
| volume = 3
| issue = 3
| year = 1970
| pages = 260–265
| ref = harv
}}
*{{cite magazine
| last = Bergonzi
| first = Bernard
| title = Selected Books
| magazine = London Magazine
| date = November 1968
| pages = 98–100
| quote = Rev. of ''Cannibals and Christians'' and ''Armies of the Night,'' by Norman Mailer.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Dearborn
| first = Mary V.
| title = Mailer: A Biography
| publisher = Houghton Mifflin
| location = Boston
| year = 1999
| ref = harv
}}
* {{citation
| last = Fontaine
| first = Dick
| title = Question for Dick Fontaine
| date = 1 April 2009
| publisher = Message to Katharine Westaway. E-mail.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| editor-last = Gallup
| editor-first = George Horace
| title = Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1935–1971
| volume = 3
| publisher = Random House
| location = New York
| year = 1972
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Gilman
| first = Richard
| title = What Mailer Has Done
| magazine = The New Republic
| date = 8 June 1968
| pages = 27–31
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Isserman
| first = Maurice
| title = The Flower and the Gun
| magazine = The Chronicle of Higher Education
| date = 19 October 2007
| pages = B14–B15
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Kazin
| first = Alfred
| title = The Trouble He’s Seen
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 5 May 1968
| page = BR1
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Lehman
| first = Daniel W.
| title = Matters of Fact: Reading Nonfiction over the Edge
| publisher = Ohio State UP
| location = Columbus
| year = 1997
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = MacFarlane
| first = Scott
| title = The Hippie Narrative: A Literary Perspective on the Counterculture
| publisher = McFarland
| location = Jefferson
| year = 2007
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Mailer
| first = Norman
| title = Advertisements for Myself
| publisher = G. P. Putnam’s Sons
| location = New York
| year = 1959
| ref = harv
}}
* ———. {{cite book
| author =
| title = Existential Aesthetics: An Interview with Norman Mailer
| others = Interview by Laura Adams
| editor-last = Lennon
| editor-first = J. Michael
| book-title = Conversations with Norman Mailer
| publisher = UP of Mississippi
| location = Jackson
| year = 1988
| pages = 207–227
| quote = Rpt. of "Existential Aesthetics: An Interview with Norman Mailer." ''Partisan Review'' 42.2 (1975): 197–214.
| ref = harv
}}
* ———. {{cite book
| author =
| chapter = Prisoner of Success: An Interview with Paul Attanasio
| editor-last = Lennon
| editor-first = J. Michael
| title = Pieces and Pontifications
| publisher = Little, Brown & Company
| location = Boston
| year = 1982
| pages = 129–136
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Manso
| first = Peter
| title = Norman Mailer: His Life and Times
| publisher = Simon and Schuster
| location = New York
| year = 1985
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Miller
| first = Joshua
| title = No Success Like Failure: Existential Politics in Norman Mailer’s ''The Armies of the Night''
| journal = Polity
| volume = 22
| issue = 3
| year = 1990
| pages = 379–396
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Radford
| first = Jean
| chapter = Norman Mailer: The True Story of an American Writer
| editor-last = Gray
| editor-first = Richard
| title = American Fiction: New Readings
| publisher = Vision Press
| location = London
| year = 1983
| pages = 222–237
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Reston
| first = James
| title = Everyone is a Loser
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 23 October 1967
| page = 1
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Roberts
| first = Gene
| title = Wallace Derides War Protesters
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 29 October 1967
| page = 45
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Schueller
| first = Malini Johar
| title = The Politics of Voice: Liberalism and Social Criticism from Franklin to Kingston
| publisher = State University of New York Press
| location = Albany
| year = 1992
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Scott
| first = Nathan A.
| title = Three American Moralists: Mailer, Bellow, Trilling
| publisher = U of Notre Dame P
| location = Notre Dame
| year = 1973
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Small
| first = Melvin
| title = Covering Dissent: The Media and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement
| publisher = Rutgers UP
| location = New Brunswick
| year = 1994
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Streitmatter
| first = Rodger
| title = Mightier Than the Sword: How the News Media Have Shaped American History
| publisher = Westview
| location = Boulder
| year = 1997
| ref = harv
}}
* ———. {{cite book
| author =
| title = Voices of Revolution: The Dissident Press in America
| publisher = Columbia UP
| location = New York
| year = 2001
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Trachtenberg
| first = Alan
| title = Mailer on the Steps of the Pentagon
| magazine = The Nation
| date = 27 May 1968
| pages = 701–702
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Wells
| first = Tom
| title = The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam
| publisher = U of California P
| location = Berkeley
| year = 1994
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Whalen-Bridge
| first = John
| chapter = Norman Mailer
| editor-first = James R.
| editor-last = Giles
| editor2-first = Wanda H.
| editor2-last = Giles
| title = American Novelists Since World War II. Seventh Series
| series = Dictionary of Literary Biography
| volume = 278
| publisher = Gale Group
| location = New York
| year = 2003
| pages = 217–232
| quote = Vol. 278 of ''Dictionary of Literary Biography''. 357 vols. to date. 1978–.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Wyatt
| first = David
| title = Living Out the Sixties
| journal = The Hopkins Review
| volume = 1
| issue = 2
| year = 2008
| pages = 315–332
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last1 = Zaroulis
| first1 = Nancy
| last2 = Sullivan
| first2 = Gerald
| title = Who Spoke Up? American Protest Against the War in Vietnam 1963–1975
| publisher = Doubleday
| location = Garden City
| year = 1984
| ref = harv
}}
{{Refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:“A Noble Pursuit”: The Armies of the Night as Outside Agitator: }}
[[Category:Miscellany (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/“A Noble Pursuit”: The Armies of the Night as Outside Agitator

2025-04-20T22:05:28Z

Chelsey.brantley: Added complete article from sandbox

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{Byline|last=Westaway|first=Katharine|url=https://prmlr.us/mr07dick|abstract=One of the achievements of ''The Armies of the Night'' is that Norman Mailer is able to designate the marchers as patriots, a far cry from the criticism that labeled them “draft dodgers,” “communists,” and “rabble rousers.” Mailer aligns the march itself with America’s long tradition of ostensibly just and triumphant empire-building conflict.He describes theMarch on the Pentagon as a rite of passage and connects this to a collection of American moments that could be understood as similar rites of passage.uniform edition.}}

{{dc|dc=O|n a weekend in October of 1967,}} tens of thousands of demonstrators
amassed in Washington DC to protest the war in Vietnam. Intending ''The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History'' (1968) to record and commemorate this eventful weekend, Norman Mailer enlarged the march on the Pentagon’s meaning, working as a novelist to make it more
than a four-day set of tremors in the nation’s capital. Some consider the
march a watershed moment, “the first in a chain of events that led to Lyndon
Johnson’s decision . . . to deescalate in Vietnam."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=70}} Mailer’s
nonfiction novel carefully examines this defining event of American history.
Through Mailer’s dual role as a demonstrator and narrator, readers are provided
a rich witness to the many obstacles that were set before marchers in the form of a biased media and government officials opposed to the peace
movement, including the military and police whose physical abuse is featured in the novel.

''Armies'' is also concerned with a sweeping view of American culture ''vis-à-vis'' the march, for this is a “literary project . . . radically committed to a
rendering of the American reality”,{{sfn|Scott|1973|p=18}} and ''Armies'' becomes Mailer’s
attempt to expand upon the march’s implications for the national character.
When ''Armies'' was published, the country was divided over the war in Vietnam; according to a 1967 Gallup poll, when asked whether “the U.S. made a mistake sending troops to Vietnam” forty-six percent said yes while almost an equal amount, forty-four percent, answered no.{{sfn|Gallup|1972|p=2087}} Mailer addresses
the division over the war and also the disparaging of anti-war {{pg|483|484}}
protestors in the mainstream press which created a gulf between mainstream America and the anti-war movement: “from late 1967 into 1968 when Mailer wrote this book, open season on the ‘hippie’ had been tacitly declared."{{sfn|MacFarlane|2007|p=131}} Mailer works to familiarize the populace with these voices of
dissent and to humanize them. The cultural clashes Mailer depicts epitomize the volatility of the U.S. at that moment, the rips in the social fabric that were becoming obvious during the escalation of the Vietnam War.

I will also consider how this novel might have acted as a catalyst for activism
for some contemporary readers and how it worked to coalesce support for the anti-war movement, addressing those Americans who were either unsympathetic towards or even appalled by the anti-war protesters
and challenging readers to see the efficacy and patriotism of the marchers’ cause. It is difficult to gauge the novel’s effectiveness on this front, but I will
consider media coverage and popular reaction to the marchers and to the
book itself. It is in the novelistic form that Mailer shares this moment in history,
and he has said that the reading of novels “is a noble pursuit, that ideally
it profoundly changes the ways in which people perceive their
experience."{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=133}} Mailer understood the great possibility of his
novel to effect change and the opportunity he had to shape readers’ understanding
of what it meant to protest the war in Vietnam.

The political divide was so great in America in the late 1960s that Mailer may have felt obliged to explain one faction to another, to use as a didactic
tool; he was teaching about a counterculture, from which many Americans
were insulated. Scott MacFarlane measures the social turmoil of the times “at a level unseen since the Civil War. The book reading public was clamoring for insight into what was happening on the streets of America."{{sfn|MacFarlane|2007|p=133}} ''Armies'' was a new window into the anti-war movement. The mainstream
media kept Americans in the dark about the anti-war movement. Readers
were witness to Mailer’s own perspective of the counterculture which was not always exhortative: “It was the children in whom Mailer had some hope, a gloomy hope. These mad middle-class children with their lobotomies from
sin, their nihilistic embezzlement of all middle-class moral funds, their innocence,
their lust for apocalypse, their unbelievable indifference to waste."{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=44}} Mailer does not form saints out of the anti-war camp, and
one could not accuse Mailer of being an outright defender of the counterculture.
But through his intimate sketches of the activists and his own experience
as a fellow marcher, we do see images of greatness, of self-sacrifice and {{pg|484|485}}
patriotism. Most important, Mailer, as narrator/protagonist, gives Americans
outside the march a sense of what it was to be a demonstrator.

One of Mailer’s main tasks as an author is to acquaint his readers with the
character of the marchers themselves, so a primary concern of ''Armies'' is media bias as it affected the American public’s sentiments about the acts of resistance happening all around them. But the mainstream press was hawkish:
before the Tet Offensive in January of 1968, “not a single major newspaper
or television network call[ed] for the end to the war."{{sfn|Streitmatter|2001|p=197}} In fact, the mainstream media plainly opposed the anti-war effort “in the heady days early in the war when American correspondents doubled as government handmaidens, they openly condemned anti-war protesters as traitors."{{sfn|Streitmatter|1997|p=201}} This was the atmosphere in which
Mailer attempted to tell a moving tale of the anti-war movement.

Mailer renounces conventional journalism; he doesn’t trust the media to analyze the anti-war movement fairly. Media studies of the time show that
“throughout [the] various stages of escalating involvement, mainstream
American journalists supported the effort, serving as exuberant cheerleaders
for the military."{{sfn|Streitmatter|2001|p=184}} Mailer frequently points out
the unfair coverage that the press gave to the actions of the demonstrators
and how "[e]mphasis was put on every rock thrown, and a count was made of the windows broken. (There were, however, only a few.) But there was no
specific mention of The Wedge [a brutal crowd control technique, which resulted
in beating of the marchers]. Indeed, stories [of police brutality]
quickly disappeared."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=313-14}} This becomes evident as Mailer distinguishes
the reporting of mainstream press from that of the alternative
press. The alternative press (such as the ''Catholic Worker'', ''I.F. Stone’s Weekly,
''National Guardian'', and ''Ramparts'') was critical of the war going back in some
cases to the 1950s when troops were first deployed to Vietnam.{{sfn|Streitmatter|2001|p=184}}

One of the most damning charges in the book is the brutality perpetrated
against the marchers, who were for the most part peacefully protesting; some
protestors were “clubbed until they were broken and bloody."{{sfn|Zaroulis and Sullivan|1984|p=138}} The abuse was amplified by the fact that it often went unreported.
For the reports of police violence, Mailer relies upon outside sources
because he had been arrested early in the demonstration before most of the
violence occurred. Yet he gains credibility when integrating outside witnesses
and reportage into a book that was mostly reported from his standpoint,{{pg|485|486}}
and these external sources may have lent more authority to the charge that
protesters were abused. For any journalist there was difficulty in covering
something as large as the march on the Pentagon “because of the extensive
terrain in question and the rapid movements of the protestors and soldiers."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=72}} Acting as a novelist-journalist, Mailer collects varied media accounts
of the march and weaves them into the narrative; here he features
one Leftist perspective of the march, identifying the witness as “Harvey
Mayes of the English Department at Hunter”:
<blockquote>One soldier spilled the water from his canteen on the ground in order to add to the discomfort of the female demonstrator at his feet. She cursed him—understandably, I think—and shifted her body. She lost her balance and her shoulder hit the rifle at the soldier’s side. He raised the rifle, and with its butt, came down hard on the girl’s leg. The girl tried to move back but was not fast enough to avoid the billy-club of a soldier in the second row of the troops. At least four times that soldier hit her with all his force.{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=303}}</blockquote>
Mailer was obliged to portray the graphic scenes from the march which were missing in many media reports. Perhaps the stories of abuse were reported on more by the Left media because the Left journalists were among the protestors, down in the tussle, while mainstream reporters observed from a safe
distance, avoiding a potential encounter with violent police.

Mailer also gave accounts of “the [mainstream] press [who were], in the
aftermath, antagonistic to the March” and so included passages of an article from the ''New York Times'' which stated that “[i]t is difficult to report publicly the ugly and vulgar provocation of many of the militants. They spat on some
of the soldiers in the front line at the Pentagon and goaded them with the most vicious personal slander. . . . [M]any officials here are surprised that
there was not much more violence."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=313}} Notice that the ''Times'' does not mention any specific violence of the MPs. Numerous commentators condemned ''not'' the beatings meted out to the demonstrators, but the protest
itself; David Brinkley called it a “coarse, vulgar episode."{{sfn|Wells|1994|p=202–3}} However,
Maurice Isserman, one marcher, remembers the marchers for the most part as peaceful, remaining “pretty true to Gandhian principles."{{sfn|Isserman|2007|p=B15}}

In looking beyond Mailer’s collection of media accounts of the march, it{{pg|486|487}}

is clear that he wasn’t exaggerating the bias against anti-war activists. The
''New York Times'' reported that Robert McNamara felt his soldiers showed “restraint . . . under provocation,"{{sfn|Reston|1967|p=1}} and in one article the protesters
were referred to as “scum of the universe”{{sfn|Roberts|1967|p=45}}; another report called the demonstration “mass paranoia . . . elicit[ing] a great deal of foolishness."{{sfn|Baker|1967|p=45}} What the press wrote about the protestors was not always so disparaging, but rarely was the message of the marchers given much time, and this sort of mainstream coverage was the only information readily
available to the general public about the anti-war movement. Some of the first reports of the march on and the siege of the Pentagon were missing reports of police violence because the reporters went home late Saturday
night before the police began employing more militant tactics. But on Monday in another story of the march the ''New York Times'' still ignored “the bloody military sweep of early Sunday morning;” the ''Washington Post''’s Monday coverage was similar in that it “continued to emphasize the violence
of the protestors, not the defenders of the Pentagon."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=76, 78}} ''Time'' came out with its story a few days after the march on October 27 in which they marginalized the protestors as “left-wing radicals, hippies, acid
heads, and people with painted faces in bizarre costumes” while at the same time “applaud[ing] the government for its restraint."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=79–80}}

Mailer is unwilling to let the picture that the mainstream press drew of demonstrators become the only permanent record, and“he scolded the press for their lies, and their misrepresentation, for their guilt in creating a psychology over the last twenty years in the average American which made wars like Vietnam possible."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=93}} Mailer understands that the press is pivotal in a nation’s critique of its culture and policies, and he takes the press to task for their failure to cultivate an informed public. Eventually, Mailer’s ''Armies'' would stand with media accounts as a record of the event. Before ''Armies'' was published as a book in 1968, it appeared in periodicals (almost the entire issues of ''Harper’s'' and ''Commentary'' were given to this story). So
Mailer responded to the mass media’s “forest of inaccuracy” first in popular periodicals and then in book form. According to Dick Fontaine, a British filmmaker who was filming a documentary of Mailer over the weekend of
the march, “Norman remembered, with frightening accuracy, minutes and minutes, pages and pages, of the dialogues he was having with the others, let alone, of course, the brilliant descriptions of time, place and mood. . . . His
memory and interpretations of . . . [these events] are truly breathtaking.”{{pg|487|488}}

This speaks well of Mailer’s journalistic sensibilities and his hope to avoid a
forest of inaccuracies himself. To this end, it is important to recall that ''Armies''
won a Polk Award for excellence in journalism.

One of the achievements of ''Armies'' is that in it Mailer is able to designate the marchers as patriots, a far cry from the criticism that labeled them “draft
dodgers,” “communists,” and “rabble rousers.” In contrast, Mailer describes draft resisters as moral and courageous: “by handing in draft cards, these
young men were committing their future either to prison, emigration, frustration,
or at best, years where everything must be unknown, and that spoke
of a readiness to take moral leaps . . . [and a] faith in one’s ability to react with
grace."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=88}} Mailer recasts draft dodgers as draft resisters, those willing to risk their lives for peace rather than war. Furthermore, Mailer aligns the march itself with America’s long tradition of ostensibly just and triumphant empire-building conflict. He describes the March on the Pentagon as a rite of passage and connects this to a collection of American moments that could be understood as similar rites of passage, for “each generation
of Americans had forged their own rite, in the forest of the Alleghenies and the Adirondacks, at Valley Forge, at New Orleans in 1812, with Rogers and Clark or at Sutter’s Mill, at Gettysburg, the Alamo, the Klondike, the Argonne, Normandy, Pusan."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=308}} Such a comparison implies that without undergoing such crises the U.S. would not have become a sovereign republic, and so the March on the Pentagon is figured as another historic challenge for the country. This lofty rhetoric is meant to stir a reader’s patriotic sympathies, and Mailer is determined that his audience will see the marchers not as subversives but as patriots within the traditions of American democracy.

Mailer understood that “to affect consciousness is thus to shape power” and that his words were shaping people’s perception of the anti-war movement.
Even if his readers were persuaded to believe in a peaceful resolution to the Vietnam War, what would these readers do with this new consciousness,
a consciousness which was “itself a central ingredient in power”{{sfn|Miller|year|p=394}}? It is difficult to measure how readers enact their power, but we can watch how Mailer enacts his own. He undertakes his own civil disobedience, getting arrested in hopes of gaining publicity and offering credence to the
cause of the march, and he understands that his symbolic action must be captured by the press to multiply its effect. When writing the story of ''Armies'', Mailer tracks his own movement from critic to supporter to war protester to{{pg|488|489}}

prisoner of conscience, and we see that he “feels the claims of imagination
as urgently as the claims of action,"{{sfn|Behar|1970|p=262}} and so he must both examine and act.

''Armies'' represents, for Mailer, a test of his moral strength, an examination of whether Mailer could stand behind his highest moral principles. The story of ''Armies'' offers a way for Mailer to put his philosophy into action and to answer the question, Are you willing to put your life on the line? David Wyatt calls Mailer “a man so obsessed by courage,” which is a persistent theme in Mailer’s famous essay “The White Negro” (1957).{{sfn|Wyatt|2008|p=318}} In many ways ''Armies'' is tied to all of Mailer’s preceding writing. The most obvious connection is to ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' (1967), but the themes and challenges of ''Armies'' are also indebted to ''Cannibals and Christians'' (1966) and ''The Presidential Papers'' (1963). These books variously tested the warrior in Mailer. Even his first book, ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948), plays a role in the conception of ''Armies''. Mary Dearborn claims that ''Armies'' is a recapitulation of his first novel bringing up questions of “confrontation with and the reaction to authority."{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=244}} In ''Armies'', Mailer’s critique of structures of power and his own civil disobedience stands in clear defiance of authoritarian establishments, the same authoritarian establishments which thwarted characters in his previous texts. Mailer’s working out of his own demons in this
journey from author to activist was also meant to engage the hearts and minds of his readers in the important business of opening their eyes to the truth about the war in Vietnam. But it is not just a story about Mailer or the many Mailer characters; Mailer serves as an entry to the predicament of the war in Vietnam and a people’s various ways to protest it.

Mailer admits early in the story his growing belief that his own writing about the Vietnam War is not enough, that “no project had seemed to cost
him enough,” for his writing was one thing, but action was another. And by simply writing about the Vietnam War “he had been suffering more and more in the past few years from the private conviction that he was getting a
little soft, a hint curdled."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=70–1}} This may have served as a barb at
his audience of readers, among whom surely numbered many armchair revolutionaries.
To keep from getting soft and to resist being contented with a
writer’s perspective, he had to move into action himself. He had to actually
take part in the demonstrations, to be physically, not just ideologically in
opposition to the war, but we are not meant to concentrate solely on Mailer’s own struggle. Rather, from his own story of activism he may bring about in {{pg|489|490}}

his readers a new understanding that through the act of reading one becomes
aware, but not yet ''involved'' in a cause. Readers might appreciate that having their consciousness raised was not the same as protesting the war in
their own communities, not at all the same as stepping out into the streets
to form a human protest. One had to move from words to action, from page to protest.

Mailer asks serious questions of his readers, as Alfred Kazin points out, describing him as the first “leading American peacenik and resister addressing urgent questions to his ‘army’—Are we good enough? How can we overcome
the ‘mediocrity of the middle-class middle-aged masses of the Left?’
The general shoddiness of American standards just now? The tendency of authorities to lie?”{{sfn|Kazin|1968|p=BR 1}} Mailer artfully places such questions within the
framework of a narrative, addressed not only to fellow peaceniks but also to
a popular readership. It was important that this novel travel beyond the Left community, and it did. Indeed, ''Armies'' “reestablished Mailer with a wide audience"{{sfn|Whalen-Bridge|2003|p=217}} and won both the Pulitzer Prize for General
Nonfiction and the National Book Award. And it was gaining a popular audience
(a readership made up of more than those on the Left) for this topic
that was a challenge for Mailer: “walking the parapet between the intellectual
and the popular, and Mailer with his dream of making ‘a revolution in
the consciousness of our time’ is too ambitious to settle for a minority ‘art’
audience."{{sfn|Radford|1983|p=230}} Mailer was ambitious enough to take on the challenge
of telling a story that those within the anti-war movement would rally
around and those outside would give a fair hearing.

The novel, first in serial and then in book form, was meant to prod readers to action. In fact, it is specifically the expansiveness of the novel genre that Mailer finds useful toward a moral end. Mailer understood the great
potential of the genre. In one interview he contends that “art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people. In particular,
I think the novel is at its best the most moral of the art forms because
it’s the most immediate, the most overbearing . . . It is the most
inescapable."{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=384}} Did Mailer’s readers find his story
inescapable, and if so, were they catalyzed to protest the war themselves? The
answer cannot easily be quantified. We can, however, study the way in which Norman Mailer tried to activate readers. Critics picked up on this hunger
of Mailer’s to make change, his “extra-literary hunger for things to change
and change now, in palpable ways rather than in the imaginary, alternative{{pg|490|491}}

ways in which most artist-novelists deal."{{sfn|Gilman|1968|p=27}} This book is not only
a testimony of civil disobedience but also a story which aims to engender civil disobedience in the reader.

Wherever readers stood on the political continuum, ''Armies'' invites readers
to justify events in the book with their real lives; it allows for “[r]eading
history over the edge of text,” which is a combination of “close reading and
analysis that allow us to get ‘inside’ the narrative, while at the same time we
understand that the narrators and subjects of nonfiction . . . live ‘outside’ the
narrative as well."{{sfn|Lehman|1997|p=3}} This makes for an intense reading experience,
especially if the novelist like Mailer uses his skills to capture an already fascinating
or contentious event. One other factor that might have turned contemporary
readers into implicated readers was the timeliness of the book’s
release: the march was more than mere history it was a recent event when the book was published just seven months after the event—and the controversy
over Vietnam still raged on.

In a nonfiction novel such as ''Armies''the story can take on very real manifestations,
which could lead to political action on the part of readers. A
reader could take measure of his or her own (in)action regarding the war
and choose to act out against the war. Such action is difficult to trace, but in
the case of ''Armies'', Rubin claims the novel “became the Bible of the movement”{{sfn|Manso|1985|p=461}}; Dearborn suggests that “young leftists found it an astute
analysis and were impressed by the passion Mailer brought to the work."{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=246}} However, Michael Albert and Noam Chomsky, both major figures in
the anti-war movement, didn’t feel that it made much of an impact within
the movement. Albert recalls “honestly, I doubt if anyone I knew or virtually
anyone in the movement read it, even I didn’t. My guess would be it had [a]
very very modest impact . . . and virtually none inside the movement per
se.” While it is unclear whether it affected those within the movement, it is also difficult to tell how it affected readers just becoming acquainted with the
peace movement. Dearborn indicates that those outside the movement were
touched by the novel: “across the political spectrum, readers who watched
the student movement with varying degrees of approval or censure were
made to understand that what was going on in the streets . . . was a real phenomenon
that had to be taken extremely seriously."{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=246}} Furthermore, the
Pulitzer and National Book Award, which were because of the novel, are a
sort of establishment seals of approval—proof that it had reached middle
America. Contemporary reviewers were generous with their praise. The
{{pg|491|492}}

''London Magazine'' named him “the best living writer of English prose."{{sfn|Bergonzi|1968|p=100}} Others saw ''Armies'' saw as a monumental book, “a literary act
whose significance is certain to grow."{{sfn|Gilman|1968|p=27}} One way the book could
live on was through the reactions of its readers.

Not only was ''Armies'' about politics, but the novel stood as a statement of
the relationship between literature and politics. To ignore politics, for the novelist, is an error. Mailer must speak politically, for “the separation of the
literary and political horizons is a mute acceptance of the structures through
which power is exercised."{{sfn|Schueller|1992|p=127}} Whether his novel convinced one
single person to join the anti-war cause or not, it was a necessary testimony. Simply by representing the happenings of the anti-war movement in narrative
form, Mailer made a new current in American politics. Perhaps Mailer
understood the inescapability of politics, for as an activist author he could
not “dissociate himself from the social contexts through which he speaks."{{sfn|Schueller|1992|p=125}} His story would be null without its complex entanglement with real political struggle.

A contemporary review of ''Armies'' in ''The Nation'' called it “a permanent contribution to our literature—a unique testimony to literary responsiveness and responsibility”{{sfn|Trachtenberg|1968|p=702}}; certainly, Mailer was responding to
important political phenomena that had not received sustained literary attention.
His writing about the rifts within the tumultuous New Left, the division
between Americans for and against the war, and the response of
government and the press to the anti-war movement did delineate important
political issues that needed to be aired. Mailer did not shy away from critique of the government or the media or of himself in order to tell the story of those in the anti-war movement.

Mailer’s novel represents a catalyst for social change through its introduction
of an anti-war subculture to a popular audience. Mailer speaks candidly
about his intentions: “I was trying to bring a consciousness to America
about the war in Vietnam. . . . I think the effect of the book was to make resistance to the war in Vietnam a little more human to people who were still supporting the war. So, yes, I think the book did have a political effect. Maybe it tended to strengthen the side opposed to the war in Vietnam."{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=220}} Jason Epstein recalls ''Armies'' as a book “meant to rally or produce a political reaction”{{sfn|Manso|1985|p=470}}; a strong argument can be made for the fact that Mailer meant to catalyze his readers. He attested to the disorganization
and dissension within the anti-war camp, but more vigorously{{pg|492|493}}
showed the misrepresentation, defamation, and even the physical denigration
of the activists. His argument for peace in Vietnam gained stature because he was a bona fide activist for the cause, facing arrest to further the significance of his protest. He was there, present at the march, and authenticated his action by telling the story of the march. ''The Armies of the Night'' exists as a testament to the anti-war movement and to the efficacy of civil disobedience.

===Citations===
{{reflist|20em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin}}
* {{citation
| last = Albert
| first = Michael
| title = A Referral from Noam Chomsky
| date = 10 November 2009
| publisher = Message to Katharine Westaway. E-mail.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Baker
| first = Russell
| title = Observer: Dove Antics
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 24 October 1967
| page = 45
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
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| first = Jack
| title = History and Fiction
| journal = NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction
| volume = 3
| issue = 3
| year = 1970
| pages = 260–265
| ref = harv
}}
*{{cite magazine
| last = Bergonzi
| first = Bernard
| title = Selected Books
| magazine = London Magazine
| date = November 1968
| pages = 98–100
| quote = Rev. of ''Cannibals and Christians'' and ''Armies of the Night,'' by Norman Mailer.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Dearborn
| first = Mary V.
| title = Mailer: A Biography
| publisher = Houghton Mifflin
| location = Boston
| year = 1999
| ref = harv
}}
* {{citation
| last = Fontaine
| first = Dick
| title = Question for Dick Fontaine
| date = 1 April 2009
| publisher = Message to Katharine Westaway. E-mail.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| editor-last = Gallup
| editor-first = George Horace
| title = Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1935–1971
| volume = 3
| publisher = Random House
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| year = 1972
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Gilman
| first = Richard
| title = What Mailer Has Done
| magazine = The New Republic
| date = 8 June 1968
| pages = 27–31
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}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Isserman
| first = Maurice
| title = The Flower and the Gun
| magazine = The Chronicle of Higher Education
| date = 19 October 2007
| pages = B14–B15
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Kazin
| first = Alfred
| title = The Trouble He’s Seen
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 5 May 1968
| page = BR1
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Lehman
| first = Daniel W.
| title = Matters of Fact: Reading Nonfiction over the Edge
| publisher = Ohio State UP
| location = Columbus
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* {{cite book
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| first = Scott
| title = The Hippie Narrative: A Literary Perspective on the Counterculture
| publisher = McFarland
| location = Jefferson
| year = 2007
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* {{cite book
| last = Mailer
| first = Norman
| title = Advertisements for Myself
| publisher = G. P. Putnam’s Sons
| location = New York
| year = 1959
| ref = harv
}}
* ———. {{cite book
| author =
| title = Existential Aesthetics: An Interview with Norman Mailer
| others = Interview by Laura Adams
| editor-last = Lennon
| editor-first = J. Michael
| book-title = Conversations with Norman Mailer
| publisher = UP of Mississippi
| location = Jackson
| year = 1988
| pages = 207–227
| quote = Rpt. of "Existential Aesthetics: An Interview with Norman Mailer." ''Partisan Review'' 42.2 (1975): 197–214.
| ref = harv
}}
* ———. {{cite book
| author =
| chapter = Prisoner of Success: An Interview with Paul Attanasio
| editor-last = Lennon
| editor-first = J. Michael
| title = Pieces and Pontifications
| publisher = Little, Brown & Company
| location = Boston
| year = 1982
| pages = 129–136
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Manso
| first = Peter
| title = Norman Mailer: His Life and Times
| publisher = Simon and Schuster
| location = New York
| year = 1985
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Miller
| first = Joshua
| title = No Success Like Failure: Existential Politics in Norman Mailer’s ''The Armies of the Night''
| journal = Polity
| volume = 22
| issue = 3
| year = 1990
| pages = 379–396
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Radford
| first = Jean
| chapter = Norman Mailer: The True Story of an American Writer
| editor-last = Gray
| editor-first = Richard
| title = American Fiction: New Readings
| publisher = Vision Press
| location = London
| year = 1983
| pages = 222–237
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Reston
| first = James
| title = Everyone is a Loser
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 23 October 1967
| page = 1
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Roberts
| first = Gene
| title = Wallace Derides War Protesters
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 29 October 1967
| page = 45
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Schueller
| first = Malini Johar
| title = The Politics of Voice: Liberalism and Social Criticism from Franklin to Kingston
| publisher = State University of New York Press
| location = Albany
| year = 1992
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Scott
| first = Nathan A.
| title = Three American Moralists: Mailer, Bellow, Trilling
| publisher = U of Notre Dame P
| location = Notre Dame
| year = 1973
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Small
| first = Melvin
| title = Covering Dissent: The Media and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement
| publisher = Rutgers UP
| location = New Brunswick
| year = 1994
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Streitmatter
| first = Rodger
| title = Mightier Than the Sword: How the News Media Have Shaped American History
| publisher = Westview
| location = Boulder
| year = 1997
| ref = harv
}}
* ———. {{cite book
| author =
| title = Voices of Revolution: The Dissident Press in America
| publisher = Columbia UP
| location = New York
| year = 2001
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Trachtenberg
| first = Alan
| title = Mailer on the Steps of the Pentagon
| magazine = The Nation
| date = 27 May 1968
| pages = 701–702
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Wells
| first = Tom
| title = The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam
| publisher = U of California P
| location = Berkeley
| year = 1994
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Whalen-Bridge
| first = John
| chapter = Norman Mailer
| editor-first = James R.
| editor-last = Giles
| editor2-first = Wanda H.
| editor2-last = Giles
| title = American Novelists Since World War II. Seventh Series
| series = Dictionary of Literary Biography
| volume = 278
| publisher = Gale Group
| location = New York
| year = 2003
| pages = 217–232
| quote = Vol. 278 of ''Dictionary of Literary Biography''. 357 vols. to date. 1978–.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Wyatt
| first = David
| title = Living Out the Sixties
| journal = The Hopkins Review
| volume = 1
| issue = 2
| year = 2008
| pages = 315–332
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last1 = Zaroulis
| first1 = Nancy
| last2 = Sullivan
| first2 = Gerald
| title = Who Spoke Up? American Protest Against the War in Vietnam 1963–1975
| publisher = Doubleday
| location = Garden City
| year = 1984
| ref = harv
}}
{{Refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:“A Noble Pursuit”: The Armies of the Night as Outside Agitator: }}
[[Category:Miscellany (MR)]]

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Chelsey.brantley: Added abstract

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{{Byline|last=Westaway|first=Katharine|url=https://prmlr.us/mr07dick|abstract=One of the achievements of ''The Armies of the Night'' is that Norman Mailer is able to designate the marchers as patriots, a far cry from the criticism that labeled them “draft dodgers,” “communists,” and “rabble rousers.” Mailer aligns the march itself with America’s long tradition of ostensibly just and triumphant empire-building conflict.He describes theMarch on the Pentagon as a rite of passage and connects this to a collection of American moments that could be understood as similar rites of passage.uniform edition.}}

{{dc|dc=O|n a weekend in October of 1967,}} tens of thousands of demonstrators
amassed in Washington DC to protest the war in Vietnam. Intending ''The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History'' (1968) to record and commemorate this eventful weekend, Norman Mailer enlarged the march on the Pentagon’s meaning, working as a novelist to make it more
than a four-day set of tremors in the nation’s capital. Some consider the
march a watershed moment, “the first in a chain of events that led to Lyndon
Johnson’s decision . . . to deescalate in Vietnam."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=70}} Mailer’s
nonfiction novel carefully examines this defining event of American history.
Through Mailer’s dual role as a demonstrator and narrator, readers are provided
a rich witness to the many obstacles that were set before marchers in the form of a biased media and government officials opposed to the peace
movement, including the military and police whose physical abuse is featured in the novel.

''Armies'' is also concerned with a sweeping view of American culture ''vis-à-vis'' the march, for this is a “literary project . . . radically committed to a
rendering of the American reality”,{{sfn|Scott|1973|p=18}} and ''Armies'' becomes Mailer’s
attempt to expand upon the march’s implications for the national character.
When ''Armies'' was published, the country was divided over the war in Vietnam; according to a 1967 Gallup poll, when asked whether “the U.S. made a mistake sending troops to Vietnam” forty-six percent said yes while almost an equal amount, forty-four percent, answered no.{{sfn|Gallup|1972|p=2087}} Mailer addresses
the division over the war and also the disparaging of anti-war {{pg|483|484}}
protestors in the mainstream press which created a gulf between mainstream America and the anti-war movement: “from late 1967 into 1968 when Mailer wrote this book, open season on the ‘hippie’ had been tacitly declared."{{sfn|MacFarlane|2007|p=131}} Mailer works to familiarize the populace with these voices of
dissent and to humanize them. The cultural clashes Mailer depicts epitomize the volatility of the U.S. at that moment, the rips in the social fabric that were becoming obvious during the escalation of the Vietnam War.

I will also consider how this novel might have acted as a catalyst for activism
for some contemporary readers and how it worked to coalesce support for the anti-war movement, addressing those Americans who were either unsympathetic towards or even appalled by the anti-war protesters
and challenging readers to see the efficacy and patriotism of the marchers’ cause. It is difficult to gauge the novel’s effectiveness on this front, but I will
consider media coverage and popular reaction to the marchers and to the
book itself. It is in the novelistic form that Mailer shares this moment in history,
and he has said that the reading of novels “is a noble pursuit, that ideally
it profoundly changes the ways in which people perceive their
experience."{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=133}} Mailer understood the great possibility of his
novel to effect change and the opportunity he had to shape readers’ understanding
of what it meant to protest the war in Vietnam.

The political divide was so great in America in the late 1960s that Mailer may have felt obliged to explain one faction to another, to use as a didactic
tool; he was teaching about a counterculture, from which many Americans
were insulated. Scott MacFarlane measures the social turmoil of the times “at a level unseen since the Civil War. The book reading public was clamoring for insight into what was happening on the streets of America."{{sfn|MacFarlane|2007|p=133}} ''Armies'' was a new window into the anti-war movement. The mainstream
media kept Americans in the dark about the anti-war movement. Readers
were witness to Mailer’s own perspective of the counterculture which was not always exhortative: “It was the children in whom Mailer had some hope, a gloomy hope. These mad middle-class children with their lobotomies from
sin, their nihilistic embezzlement of all middle-class moral funds, their innocence,
their lust for apocalypse, their unbelievable indifference to waste."{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=44}} Mailer does not form saints out of the anti-war camp, and
one could not accuse Mailer of being an outright defender of the counterculture.
But through his intimate sketches of the activists and his own experience
as a fellow marcher, we do see images of greatness, of self-sacrifice and {{pg|484|485}}
patriotism. Most important, Mailer, as narrator/protagonist, gives Americans
outside the march a sense of what it was to be a demonstrator.

One of Mailer’s main tasks as an author is to acquaint his readers with the
character of the marchers themselves, so a primary concern of ''Armies'' is media bias as it affected the American public’s sentiments about the acts of resistance happening all around them. But the mainstream press was hawkish:
before the Tet Offensive in January of 1968, “not a single major newspaper
or television network call[ed] for the end to the war."{{sfn|Streitmatter|2001|p=197}} In fact, the mainstream media plainly opposed the anti-war effort “in the heady days early in the war when American correspondents doubled as government handmaidens, they openly condemned anti-war protesters as traitors."{{sfn|Streitmatter|1997|p=201}} This was the atmosphere in which
Mailer attempted to tell a moving tale of the anti-war movement.

Mailer renounces conventional journalism; he doesn’t trust the media to analyze the anti-war movement fairly. Media studies of the time show that
“throughout [the] various stages of escalating involvement, mainstream
American journalists supported the effort, serving as exuberant cheerleaders
for the military."{{sfn|Streitmatter|2001|p=184}} Mailer frequently points out
the unfair coverage that the press gave to the actions of the demonstrators
and how "[e]mphasis was put on every rock thrown, and a count was made of the windows broken. (There were, however, only a few.) But there was no
specific mention of The Wedge [a brutal crowd control technique, which resulted
in beating of the marchers]. Indeed, stories [of police brutality]
quickly disappeared."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=313-14}} This becomes evident as Mailer distinguishes
the reporting of mainstream press from that of the alternative
press. The alternative press (such as the ''Catholic Worker'', ''I.F. Stone’s Weekly,
''National Guardian'', and ''Ramparts'') was critical of the war going back in some
cases to the 1950s when troops were first deployed to Vietnam.{{sfn|Streitmatter|2001|p=184}}

One of the most damning charges in the book is the brutality perpetrated
against the marchers, who were for the most part peacefully protesting; some
protestors were “clubbed until they were broken and bloody."{{sfn|Zaroulis and Sullivan|1984|p=138}} The abuse was amplified by the fact that it often went unreported.
For the reports of police violence, Mailer relies upon outside sources
because he had been arrested early in the demonstration before most of the
violence occurred. Yet he gains credibility when integrating outside witnesses
and reportage into a book that was mostly reported from his standpoint,{{pg|485|486}}
and these external sources may have lent more authority to the charge that
protesters were abused. For any journalist there was difficulty in covering
something as large as the march on the Pentagon “because of the extensive
terrain in question and the rapid movements of the protestors and soldiers."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=72}} Acting as a novelist-journalist, Mailer collects varied media accounts
of the march and weaves them into the narrative; here he features
one Leftist perspective of the march, identifying the witness as “Harvey
Mayes of the English Department at Hunter”:
<blockquote>One soldier spilled the water from his canteen on the ground in order to add to the discomfort of the female demonstrator at his feet. She cursed him—understandably, I think—and shifted her body. She lost her balance and her shoulder hit the rifle at the soldier’s side. He raised the rifle, and with its butt, came down hard on the girl’s leg. The girl tried to move back but was not fast enough to avoid the billy-club of a soldier in the second row of the troops. At least four times that soldier hit her with all his force.{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=303}}</blockquote>
Mailer was obliged to portray the graphic scenes from the march which were missing in many media reports. Perhaps the stories of abuse were reported on more by the Left media because the Left journalists were among the protestors, down in the tussle, while mainstream reporters observed from a safe
distance, avoiding a potential encounter with violent police.

Mailer also gave accounts of “the [mainstream] press [who were], in the
aftermath, antagonistic to the March” and so included passages of an article from the ''New York Times'' which stated that “[i]t is difficult to report publicly the ugly and vulgar provocation of many of the militants. They spat on some
of the soldiers in the front line at the Pentagon and goaded them with the most vicious personal slander. . . . [M]any officials here are surprised that
there was not much more violence."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=313}} Notice that the ''Times'' does not mention any specific violence of the MPs. Numerous commentators condemned ''not'' the beatings meted out to the demonstrators, but the protest
itself; David Brinkley called it a “coarse, vulgar episode."{{sfn|Wells|1994|p=202–3}} However,
Maurice Isserman, one marcher, remembers the marchers for the most part as peaceful, remaining “pretty true to Gandhian principles."{{sfn|Isserman|2007|p=B15}}

In looking beyond Mailer’s collection of media accounts of the march, it{{pg|486|487}}

is clear that he wasn’t exaggerating the bias against anti-war activists. The
''New York Times'' reported that Robert McNamara felt his soldiers showed “restraint . . . under provocation,"{{sfn|Reston|1967|p=1}} and in one article the protesters
were referred to as “scum of the universe”{{sfn|Roberts|1967|p=45}}; another report called the demonstration “mass paranoia . . . elicit[ing] a great deal of foolishness."{{sfn|Baker|1967|p=45}} What the press wrote about the protestors was not always so disparaging, but rarely was the message of the marchers given much time, and this sort of mainstream coverage was the only information readily
available to the general public about the anti-war movement. Some of the first reports of the march on and the siege of the Pentagon were missing reports of police violence because the reporters went home late Saturday
night before the police began employing more militant tactics. But on Monday in another story of the march the ''New York Times'' still ignored “the bloody military sweep of early Sunday morning;” the ''Washington Post''’s Monday coverage was similar in that it “continued to emphasize the violence
of the protestors, not the defenders of the Pentagon."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=76, 78}} ''Time'' came out with its story a few days after the march on October 27 in which they marginalized the protestors as “left-wing radicals, hippies, acid
heads, and people with painted faces in bizarre costumes” while at the same time “applaud[ing] the government for its restraint."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=79–80}}

Mailer is unwilling to let the picture that the mainstream press drew of demonstrators become the only permanent record, and“he scolded the press for their lies, and their misrepresentation, for their guilt in creating a psychology over the last twenty years in the average American which made wars like Vietnam possible."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=93}} Mailer understands that the press is pivotal in a nation’s critique of its culture and policies, and he takes the press to task for their failure to cultivate an informed public. Eventually, Mailer’s ''Armies'' would stand with media accounts as a record of the event. Before ''Armies'' was published as a book in 1968, it appeared in periodicals (almost the entire issues of ''Harper’s'' and ''Commentary'' were given to this story). So
Mailer responded to the mass media’s “forest of inaccuracy” first in popular periodicals and then in book form. According to Dick Fontaine, a British filmmaker who was filming a documentary of Mailer over the weekend of
the march, “Norman remembered, with frightening accuracy, minutes and minutes, pages and pages, of the dialogues he was having with the others, let alone, of course, the brilliant descriptions of time, place and mood. . . . His
memory and interpretations of . . . [these events] are truly breathtaking.”{{pg|487|488}}

This speaks well of Mailer’s journalistic sensibilities and his hope to avoid a
forest of inaccuracies himself. To this end, it is important to recall that ''Armies''
won a Polk Award for excellence in journalism.

One of the achievements of ''Armies'' is that in it Mailer is able to designate the marchers as patriots, a far cry from the criticism that labeled them “draft
dodgers,” “communists,” and “rabble rousers.” In contrast, Mailer describes draft resisters as moral and courageous: “by handing in draft cards, these
young men were committing their future either to prison, emigration, frustration,
or at best, years where everything must be unknown, and that spoke
of a readiness to take moral leaps . . . [and a] faith in one’s ability to react with
grace."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=88}} Mailer recasts draft dodgers as draft resisters, those willing to risk their lives for peace rather than war. Furthermore, Mailer aligns the march itself with America’s long tradition of ostensibly just and triumphant empire-building conflict. He describes the March on the Pentagon as a rite of passage and connects this to a collection of American moments that could be understood as similar rites of passage, for “each generation
of Americans had forged their own rite, in the forest of the Alleghenies and the Adirondacks, at Valley Forge, at New Orleans in 1812, with Rogers and Clark or at Sutter’s Mill, at Gettysburg, the Alamo, the Klondike, the Argonne, Normandy, Pusan."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=308}} Such a comparison implies that without undergoing such crises the U.S. would not have become a sovereign republic, and so the March on the Pentagon is figured as another historic challenge for the country. This lofty rhetoric is meant to stir a reader’s patriotic sympathies, and Mailer is determined that his audience will see the marchers not as subversives but as patriots within the traditions of American democracy.

Mailer understood that “to affect consciousness is thus to shape power” and that his words were shaping people’s perception of the anti-war movement.
Even if his readers were persuaded to believe in a peaceful resolution to the Vietnam War, what would these readers do with this new consciousness,
a consciousness which was “itself a central ingredient in power”{{sfn|Miller|year|p=394}}? It is difficult to measure how readers enact their power, but we can watch how Mailer enacts his own. He undertakes his own civil disobedience, getting arrested in hopes of gaining publicity and offering credence to the
cause of the march, and he understands that his symbolic action must be captured by the press to multiply its effect. When writing the story of ''Armies'', Mailer tracks his own movement from critic to supporter to war protester to{{pg|488|489}}

prisoner of conscience, and we see that he “feels the claims of imagination
as urgently as the claims of action,"{{sfn|Behar|1970|p=262}} and so he must both examine and act.

''Armies'' represents, for Mailer, a test of his moral strength, an examination of whether Mailer could stand behind his highest moral principles. The story of ''Armies'' offers a way for Mailer to put his philosophy into action and to answer the question, Are you willing to put your life on the line? David Wyatt calls Mailer “a man so obsessed by courage,” which is a persistent theme in Mailer’s famous essay “The White Negro” (1957).{{sfn|Wyatt|2008|p=318}} In many ways ''Armies'' is tied to all of Mailer’s preceding writing. The most obvious connection is to ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' (1967), but the themes and challenges of ''Armies'' are also indebted to ''Cannibals and Christians'' (1966) and ''The Presidential Papers'' (1963). These books variously tested the warrior in Mailer. Even his first book, ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948), plays a role in the conception of ''Armies''. Mary Dearborn claims that ''Armies'' is a recapitulation of his first novel bringing up questions of “confrontation with and the reaction to authority."{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=244}} In ''Armies'', Mailer’s critique of structures of power and his own civil disobedience stands in clear defiance of authoritarian establishments, the same authoritarian establishments which thwarted characters in his previous texts. Mailer’s working out of his own demons in this
journey from author to activist was also meant to engage the hearts and minds of his readers in the important business of opening their eyes to the truth about the war in Vietnam. But it is not just a story about Mailer or the many Mailer characters; Mailer serves as an entry to the predicament of the war in Vietnam and a people’s various ways to protest it.

Mailer admits early in the story his growing belief that his own writing about the Vietnam War is not enough, that “no project had seemed to cost
him enough,” for his writing was one thing, but action was another. And by simply writing about the Vietnam War “he had been suffering more and more in the past few years from the private conviction that he was getting a
little soft, a hint curdled."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=70–1}} This may have served as a barb at
his audience of readers, among whom surely numbered many armchair revolutionaries.
To keep from getting soft and to resist being contented with a
writer’s perspective, he had to move into action himself. He had to actually
take part in the demonstrations, to be physically, not just ideologically in
opposition to the war, but we are not meant to concentrate solely on Mailer’s own struggle. Rather, from his own story of activism he may bring about in {{pg|489|490}}

his readers a new understanding that through the act of reading one becomes
aware, but not yet ''involved'' in a cause. Readers might appreciate that having their consciousness raised was not the same as protesting the war in
their own communities, not at all the same as stepping out into the streets
to form a human protest. One had to move from words to action, from page to protest.

Mailer asks serious questions of his readers, as Alfred Kazin points out, describing him as the first “leading American peacenik and resister addressing urgent questions to his ‘army’—Are we good enough? How can we overcome
the ‘mediocrity of the middle-class middle-aged masses of the Left?’
The general shoddiness of American standards just now? The tendency of authorities to lie?”{{sfn|Kazin|1968|p=BR 1}} Mailer artfully places such questions within the
framework of a narrative, addressed not only to fellow peaceniks but also to
a popular readership. It was important that this novel travel beyond the Left community, and it did. Indeed, ''Armies'' “reestablished Mailer with a wide audience"{{sfn|Whalen-Bridge|2003|p=217}} and won both the Pulitzer Prize for General
Nonfiction and the National Book Award. And it was gaining a popular audience
(a readership made up of more than those on the Left) for this topic
that was a challenge for Mailer: “walking the parapet between the intellectual
and the popular, and Mailer with his dream of making ‘a revolution in
the consciousness of our time’ is too ambitious to settle for a minority ‘art’
audience."{{sfn|Radford|1983|p=230}} Mailer was ambitious enough to take on the challenge
of telling a story that those within the anti-war movement would rally
around and those outside would give a fair hearing.

The novel, first in serial and then in book form, was meant to prod readers to action. In fact, it is specifically the expansiveness of the novel genre that Mailer finds useful toward a moral end. Mailer understood the great
potential of the genre. In one interview he contends that “art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people. In particular,
I think the novel is at its best the most moral of the art forms because
it’s the most immediate, the most overbearing . . . It is the most
inescapable."{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=384}} Did Mailer’s readers find his story
inescapable, and if so, were they catalyzed to protest the war themselves? The
answer cannot easily be quantified. We can, however, study the way in which Norman Mailer tried to activate readers. Critics picked up on this hunger
of Mailer’s to make change, his “extra-literary hunger for things to change
and change now, in palpable ways rather than in the imaginary, alternative{{pg|490|491}}

ways in which most artist-novelists deal."{{sfn|Gilman|1968|p=27}} This book is not only
a testimony of civil disobedience but also a story which aims to engender civil disobedience in the reader.

Wherever readers stood on the political continuum, ''Armies'' invites readers
to justify events in the book with their real lives; it allows for “[r]eading
history over the edge of text,” which is a combination of “close reading and
analysis that allow us to get ‘inside’ the narrative, while at the same time we
understand that the narrators and subjects of nonfiction . . . live ‘outside’ the
narrative as well."{{sfn|Lehman|1997|p=3}} This makes for an intense reading experience,
especially if the novelist like Mailer uses his skills to capture an already fascinating
or contentious event. One other factor that might have turned contemporary
readers into implicated readers was the timeliness of the book’s
release: the march was more than mere history it was a recent event when the book was published just seven months after the event—and the controversy
over Vietnam still raged on.

In a nonfiction novel such as ''Armies''the story can take on very real manifestations,
which could lead to political action on the part of readers. A
reader could take measure of his or her own (in)action regarding the war
and choose to act out against the war. Such action is difficult to trace, but in
the case of ''Armies'', Rubin claims the novel “became the Bible of the movement”{{sfn|Manso|1985|p=461}}; Dearborn suggests that “young leftists found it an astute
analysis and were impressed by the passion Mailer brought to the work."{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=246}} However, Michael Albert and Noam Chomsky, both major figures in
the anti-war movement, didn’t feel that it made much of an impact within
the movement. Albert recalls “honestly, I doubt if anyone I knew or virtually
anyone in the movement read it, even I didn’t. My guess would be it had [a]
very very modest impact . . . and virtually none inside the movement per
se.” While it is unclear whether it affected those within the movement, it is also difficult to tell how it affected readers just becoming acquainted with the
peace movement. Dearborn indicates that those outside the movement were
touched by the novel: “across the political spectrum, readers who watched
the student movement with varying degrees of approval or censure were
made to understand that what was going on in the streets . . . was a real phenomenon
that had to be taken extremely seriously."{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=246}} Furthermore, the
Pulitzer and National Book Award, which were because of the novel, are a
sort of establishment seals of approval—proof that it had reached middle
America. Contemporary reviewers were generous with their praise. The
{{pg|491|492}}

''London Magazine'' named him “the best living writer of English prose."{{sfn|Bergonzi|1968|p=100}} Others saw ''Armies'' saw as a monumental book, “a literary act
whose significance is certain to grow."{{sfn|Gilman|1968|p=27}} One way the book could
live on was through the reactions of its readers.

Not only was ''Armies'' about politics, but the novel stood as a statement of
the relationship between literature and politics. To ignore politics, for the novelist, is an error. Mailer must speak politically, for “the separation of the
literary and political horizons is a mute acceptance of the structures through
which power is exercised."{{sfn|Schueller|1992|p=127}} Whether his novel convinced one
single person to join the anti-war cause or not, it was a necessary testimony. Simply by representing the happenings of the anti-war movement in narrative
form, Mailer made a new current in American politics. Perhaps Mailer
understood the inescapability of politics, for as an activist author he could
not “dissociate himself from the social contexts through which he speaks."{{sfn|Schueller|1992|p=125}} His story would be null without its complex entanglement with real political struggle.

A contemporary review of ''Armies'' in ''The Nation'' called it “a permanent contribution to our literature—a unique testimony to literary responsiveness and responsibility”{{sfn|Trachtenberg|1968|p=702}}; certainly, Mailer was responding to
important political phenomena that had not received sustained literary attention.
His writing about the rifts within the tumultuous New Left, the division
between Americans for and against the war, and the response of
government and the press to the anti-war movement did delineate important
political issues that needed to be aired. Mailer did not shy away from critique of the government or the media or of himself in order to tell the story of those in the anti-war movement.

Mailer’s novel represents a catalyst for social change through its introduction
of an anti-war subculture to a popular audience. Mailer speaks candidly
about his intentions: “I was trying to bring a consciousness to America
about the war in Vietnam. . . . I think the effect of the book was to make resistance to the war in Vietnam a little more human to people who were still supporting the war. So, yes, I think the book did have a political effect. Maybe it tended to strengthen the side opposed to the war in Vietnam."{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=220}} Jason Epstein recalls ''Armies'' as a book “meant to rally or produce a political reaction”{{sfn|Manso|1985|p=470}}; a strong argument can be made for the fact that Mailer meant to catalyze his readers. He attested to the disorganization
and dissension within the anti-war camp, but more vigorously{{pg|492|493}}
showed the misrepresentation, defamation, and even the physical denigration
of the activists. His argument for peace in Vietnam gained stature because he was a bona fide activist for the cause, facing arrest to further the significance of his protest. He was there, present at the march, and authenticated his action by telling the story of the march. ''The Armies of the Night'' exists as a testament to the anti-war movement and to the efficacy of civil disobedience.

===Citations===
{{reflist|20em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin}}
* {{citation
| last = Albert
| first = Michael
| title = A Referral from Noam Chomsky
| date = 10 November 2009
| publisher = Message to Katharine Westaway. E-mail.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Baker
| first = Russell
| title = Observer: Dove Antics
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 24 October 1967
| page = 45
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Behar
| first = Jack
| title = History and Fiction
| journal = NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction
| volume = 3
| issue = 3
| year = 1970
| pages = 260–265
| ref = harv
}}
*{{cite magazine
| last = Bergonzi
| first = Bernard
| title = Selected Books
| magazine = London Magazine
| date = November 1968
| pages = 98–100
| quote = Rev. of ''Cannibals and Christians'' and ''Armies of the Night,'' by Norman Mailer.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Dearborn
| first = Mary V.
| title = Mailer: A Biography
| publisher = Houghton Mifflin
| location = Boston
| year = 1999
| ref = harv
}}
* {{citation
| last = Fontaine
| first = Dick
| title = Question for Dick Fontaine
| date = 1 April 2009
| publisher = Message to Katharine Westaway. E-mail.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| editor-last = Gallup
| editor-first = George Horace
| title = Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1935–1971
| volume = 3
| publisher = Random House
| location = New York
| year = 1972
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Gilman
| first = Richard
| title = What Mailer Has Done
| magazine = The New Republic
| date = 8 June 1968
| pages = 27–31
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Isserman
| first = Maurice
| title = The Flower and the Gun
| magazine = The Chronicle of Higher Education
| date = 19 October 2007
| pages = B14–B15
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Kazin
| first = Alfred
| title = The Trouble He’s Seen
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 5 May 1968
| page = BR1
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Lehman
| first = Daniel W.
| title = Matters of Fact: Reading Nonfiction over the Edge
| publisher = Ohio State UP
| location = Columbus
| year = 1997
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = MacFarlane
| first = Scott
| title = The Hippie Narrative: A Literary Perspective on the Counterculture
| publisher = McFarland
| location = Jefferson
| year = 2007
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Mailer
| first = Norman
| title = Advertisements for Myself
| publisher = G. P. Putnam’s Sons
| location = New York
| year = 1959
| ref = harv
}}
* ———. {{cite book
| author =
| title = Existential Aesthetics: An Interview with Norman Mailer
| others = Interview by Laura Adams
| editor-last = Lennon
| editor-first = J. Michael
| book-title = Conversations with Norman Mailer
| publisher = UP of Mississippi
| location = Jackson
| year = 1988
| pages = 207–227
| quote = Rpt. of "Existential Aesthetics: An Interview with Norman Mailer." ''Partisan Review'' 42.2 (1975): 197–214.
| ref = harv
}}
* ———. {{cite book
| author =
| chapter = Prisoner of Success: An Interview with Paul Attanasio
| editor-last = Lennon
| editor-first = J. Michael
| title = Pieces and Pontifications
| publisher = Little, Brown & Company
| location = Boston
| year = 1982
| pages = 129–136
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Manso
| first = Peter
| title = Norman Mailer: His Life and Times
| publisher = Simon and Schuster
| location = New York
| year = 1985
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Miller
| first = Joshua
| title = No Success Like Failure: Existential Politics in Norman Mailer’s ''The Armies of the Night''
| journal = Polity
| volume = 22
| issue = 3
| year = 1990
| pages = 379–396
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Radford
| first = Jean
| chapter = Norman Mailer: The True Story of an American Writer
| editor-last = Gray
| editor-first = Richard
| title = American Fiction: New Readings
| publisher = Vision Press
| location = London
| year = 1983
| pages = 222–237
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Reston
| first = James
| title = Everyone is a Loser
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 23 October 1967
| page = 1
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Roberts
| first = Gene
| title = Wallace Derides War Protesters
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 29 October 1967
| page = 45
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Schueller
| first = Malini Johar
| title = The Politics of Voice: Liberalism and Social Criticism from Franklin to Kingston
| publisher = State University of New York Press
| location = Albany
| year = 1992
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Scott
| first = Nathan A.
| title = Three American Moralists: Mailer, Bellow, Trilling
| publisher = U of Notre Dame P
| location = Notre Dame
| year = 1973
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Small
| first = Melvin
| title = Covering Dissent: The Media and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement
| publisher = Rutgers UP
| location = New Brunswick
| year = 1994
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Streitmatter
| first = Rodger
| title = Mightier Than the Sword: How the News Media Have Shaped American History
| publisher = Westview
| location = Boulder
| year = 1997
| ref = harv
}}
* ———. {{cite book
| author =
| title = Voices of Revolution: The Dissident Press in America
| publisher = Columbia UP
| location = New York
| year = 2001
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Trachtenberg
| first = Alan
| title = Mailer on the Steps of the Pentagon
| magazine = The Nation
| date = 27 May 1968
| pages = 701–702
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Wells
| first = Tom
| title = The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam
| publisher = U of California P
| location = Berkeley
| year = 1994
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Whalen-Bridge
| first = John
| chapter = Norman Mailer
| editor-first = James R.
| editor-last = Giles
| editor2-first = Wanda H.
| editor2-last = Giles
| title = American Novelists Since World War II. Seventh Series
| series = Dictionary of Literary Biography
| volume = 278
| publisher = Gale Group
| location = New York
| year = 2003
| pages = 217–232
| quote = Vol. 278 of ''Dictionary of Literary Biography''. 357 vols. to date. 1978–.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Wyatt
| first = David
| title = Living Out the Sixties
| journal = The Hopkins Review
| volume = 1
| issue = 2
| year = 2008
| pages = 315–332
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last1 = Zaroulis
| first1 = Nancy
| last2 = Sullivan
| first2 = Gerald
| title = Who Spoke Up? American Protest Against the War in Vietnam 1963–1975
| publisher = Doubleday
| location = Garden City
| year = 1984
| ref = harv
}}
{{Refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:“A Noble Pursuit”: The Armies of the Night as Outside Agitator: }}
[[Category:Miscellany (MR)]]

User:Chelsey.brantley/sandbox

2025-04-19T15:35:51Z

Chelsey.brantley: Corrected typos; replaced dashes with em dashes in citation page numbers

{{user sandbox|plain=yes}}

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}}

{{Byline|last=Westaway|first=Katharine|url=https://prmlr.us/mr07dick|abstract=Mailer has been . . . uniform edition.|note=This paper served . . . me to participate.}}

{{dc|dc=O|n a weekend in October of 1967,}} tens of thousands of demonstrators
amassed in Washington DC to protest the war in Vietnam. Intending ''The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History'' (1968) to record and commemorate this eventful weekend, Norman Mailer enlarged the march on the Pentagon’s meaning, working as a novelist to make it more
than a four-day set of tremors in the nation’s capital. Some consider the
march a watershed moment, “the first in a chain of events that led to Lyndon
Johnson’s decision . . . to deescalate in Vietnam."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=70}} Mailer’s
nonfiction novel carefully examines this defining event of American history.
Through Mailer’s dual role as a demonstrator and narrator, readers are provided
a rich witness to the many obstacles that were set before marchers in the form of a biased media and government officials opposed to the peace
movement, including the military and police whose physical abuse is featured in the novel.

''Armies'' is also concerned with a sweeping view of American culture ''vis-à-vis'' the march, for this is a “literary project . . . radically committed to a
rendering of the American reality”,{{sfn|Scott|1973|p=18}} and ''Armies'' becomes Mailer’s
attempt to expand upon the march’s implications for the national character.
When ''Armies'' was published, the country was divided over the war in Vietnam; according to a 1967 Gallup poll, when asked whether “the U.S. made a mistake sending troops to Vietnam” forty-six percent said yes while almost an equal amount, forty-four percent, answered no.{{sfn|Gallup|1972|p=2087}} Mailer addresses
the division over the war and also the disparaging of anti-war {{pg|483|484}}
protestors in the mainstream press which created a gulf between mainstream America and the anti-war movement: “from late 1967 into 1968 when Mailer wrote this book, open season on the ‘hippie’ had been tacitly declared."{{sfn|MacFarlane|2007|p=131}} Mailer works to familiarize the populace with these voices of
dissent and to humanize them. The cultural clashes Mailer depicts epitomize the volatility of the U.S. at that moment, the rips in the social fabric that were becoming obvious during the escalation of the Vietnam War.

I will also consider how this novel might have acted as a catalyst for activism
for some contemporary readers and how it worked to coalesce support for the anti-war movement, addressing those Americans who were either unsympathetic towards or even appalled by the anti-war protesters
and challenging readers to see the efficacy and patriotism of the marchers’ cause. It is difficult to gauge the novel’s effectiveness on this front, but I will
consider media coverage and popular reaction to the marchers and to the
book itself. It is in the novelistic form that Mailer shares this moment in history,
and he has said that the reading of novels “is a noble pursuit, that ideally
it profoundly changes the ways in which people perceive their
experience."{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=133}} Mailer understood the great possibility of his
novel to effect change and the opportunity he had to shape readers’ understanding
of what it meant to protest the war in Vietnam.

The political divide was so great in America in the late 1960s that Mailer may have felt obliged to explain one faction to another, to use as a didactic
tool; he was teaching about a counterculture, from which many Americans
were insulated. Scott MacFarlane measures the social turmoil of the times “at a level unseen since the Civil War. The book reading public was clamoring for insight into what was happening on the streets of America."{{sfn|MacFarlane|2007|p=133}} ''Armies'' was a new window into the anti-war movement. The mainstream
media kept Americans in the dark about the anti-war movement. Readers
were witness to Mailer’s own perspective of the counterculture which was not always exhortative: “It was the children in whom Mailer had some hope, a gloomy hope. These mad middle-class children with their lobotomies from
sin, their nihilistic embezzlement of all middle-class moral funds, their innocence,
their lust for apocalypse, their unbelievable indifference to waste."{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=44}} Mailer does not form saints out of the anti-war camp, and
one could not accuse Mailer of being an outright defender of the counterculture.
But through his intimate sketches of the activists and his own experience
as a fellow marcher, we do see images of greatness, of self-sacrifice and {{pg|484|485}}
patriotism. Most important, Mailer, as narrator/protagonist, gives Americans
outside the march a sense of what it was to be a demonstrator.

One of Mailer’s main tasks as an author is to acquaint his readers with the
character of the marchers themselves, so a primary concern of ''Armies'' is media bias as it affected the American public’s sentiments about the acts of resistance happening all around them. But the mainstream press was hawkish:
before the Tet Offensive in January of 1968, “not a single major newspaper
or television network call[ed] for the end to the war."{{sfn|Streitmatter|2001|p=197}} In fact, the mainstream media plainly opposed the anti-war effort “in the heady days early in the war when American correspondents doubled as government handmaidens, they openly condemned anti-war protesters as traitors."{{sfn|Streitmatter|1997|p=201}} This was the atmosphere in which
Mailer attempted to tell a moving tale of the anti-war movement.

Mailer renounces conventional journalism; he doesn’t trust the media to analyze the anti-war movement fairly. Media studies of the time show that
“throughout [the] various stages of escalating involvement, mainstream
American journalists supported the effort, serving as exuberant cheerleaders
for the military."{{sfn|Streitmatter|2001|p=184}} Mailer frequently points out
the unfair coverage that the press gave to the actions of the demonstrators
and how "[e]mphasis was put on every rock thrown, and a count was made of the windows broken. (There were, however, only a few.) But there was no
specific mention of The Wedge [a brutal crowd control technique, which resulted
in beating of the marchers]. Indeed, stories [of police brutality]
quickly disappeared."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=313-14}} This becomes evident as Mailer distinguishes
the reporting of mainstream press from that of the alternative
press. The alternative press (such as the ''Catholic Worker'', ''I.F. Stone’s Weekly,
''National Guardian'', and ''Ramparts'') was critical of the war going back in some
cases to the 1950s when troops were first deployed to Vietnam.{{sfn|Streitmatter|2001|p=184}}

One of the most damning charges in the book is the brutality perpetrated
against the marchers, who were for the most part peacefully protesting; some
protestors were “clubbed until they were broken and bloody."{{sfn|Zaroulis and Sullivan|1984|p=138}} The abuse was amplified by the fact that it often went unreported.
For the reports of police violence, Mailer relies upon outside sources
because he had been arrested early in the demonstration before most of the
violence occurred. Yet he gains credibility when integrating outside witnesses
and reportage into a book that was mostly reported from his standpoint,{{pg|485|486}}
and these external sources may have lent more authority to the charge that
protesters were abused. For any journalist there was difficulty in covering
something as large as the march on the Pentagon “because of the extensive
terrain in question and the rapid movements of the protestors and soldiers."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=72}} Acting as a novelist-journalist, Mailer collects varied media accounts
of the march and weaves them into the narrative; here he features
one Leftist perspective of the march, identifying the witness as “Harvey
Mayes of the English Department at Hunter”:
<blockquote>One soldier spilled the water from his canteen on the ground in order to add to the discomfort of the female demonstrator at his feet. She cursed him—understandably, I think—and shifted her body. She lost her balance and her shoulder hit the rifle at the soldier’s side. He raised the rifle, and with its butt, came down hard on the girl’s leg. The girl tried to move back but was not fast enough to avoid the billy-club of a soldier in the second row of the troops. At least four times that soldier hit her with all his force.{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=303}}</blockquote>
Mailer was obliged to portray the graphic scenes from the march which were missing in many media reports. Perhaps the stories of abuse were reported on more by the Left media because the Left journalists were among the protestors, down in the tussle, while mainstream reporters observed from a safe
distance, avoiding a potential encounter with violent police.

Mailer also gave accounts of “the [mainstream] press [who were], in the
aftermath, antagonistic to the March” and so included passages of an article from the ''New York Times'' which stated that “[i]t is difficult to report publicly the ugly and vulgar provocation of many of the militants. They spat on some
of the soldiers in the front line at the Pentagon and goaded them with the most vicious personal slander. . . . [M]any officials here are surprised that
there was not much more violence."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=313}} Notice that the ''Times'' does not mention any specific violence of the MPs. Numerous commentators condemned ''not'' the beatings meted out to the demonstrators, but the protest
itself; David Brinkley called it a “coarse, vulgar episode."{{sfn|Wells|1994|p=202–3}} However,
Maurice Isserman, one marcher, remembers the marchers for the most part as peaceful, remaining “pretty true to Gandhian principles."{{sfn|Isserman|2007|p=B15}}

In looking beyond Mailer’s collection of media accounts of the march, it{{pg|486|487}}

is clear that he wasn’t exaggerating the bias against anti-war activists. The
''New York Times'' reported that Robert McNamara felt his soldiers showed “restraint . . . under provocation,"{{sfn|Reston|1967|p=1}} and in one article the protesters
were referred to as “scum of the universe”{{sfn|Roberts|1967|p=45}}; another report called the demonstration “mass paranoia . . . elicit[ing] a great deal of foolishness."{{sfn|Baker|1967|p=45}} What the press wrote about the protestors was not always so disparaging, but rarely was the message of the marchers given much time, and this sort of mainstream coverage was the only information readily
available to the general public about the anti-war movement. Some of the first reports of the march on and the siege of the Pentagon were missing reports of police violence because the reporters went home late Saturday
night before the police began employing more militant tactics. But on Monday in another story of the march the ''New York Times'' still ignored “the bloody military sweep of early Sunday morning;” the ''Washington Post''’s Monday coverage was similar in that it “continued to emphasize the violence
of the protestors, not the defenders of the Pentagon."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=76, 78}} ''Time'' came out with its story a few days after the march on October 27 in which they marginalized the protestors as “left-wing radicals, hippies, acid
heads, and people with painted faces in bizarre costumes” while at the same time “applaud[ing] the government for its restraint."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=79–80}}

Mailer is unwilling to let the picture that the mainstream press drew of demonstrators become the only permanent record, and“he scolded the press for their lies, and their misrepresentation, for their guilt in creating a psychology over the last twenty years in the average American which made wars like Vietnam possible."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=93}} Mailer understands that the press is pivotal in a nation’s critique of its culture and policies, and he takes the press to task for their failure to cultivate an informed public. Eventually, Mailer’s ''Armies'' would stand with media accounts as a record of the event. Before ''Armies'' was published as a book in 1968, it appeared in periodicals (almost the entire issues of ''Harper’s'' and ''Commentary'' were given to this story). So
Mailer responded to the mass media’s “forest of inaccuracy” first in popular periodicals and then in book form. According to Dick Fontaine, a British filmmaker who was filming a documentary of Mailer over the weekend of
the march, “Norman remembered, with frightening accuracy, minutes and minutes, pages and pages, of the dialogues he was having with the others, let alone, of course, the brilliant descriptions of time, place and mood. . . . His
memory and interpretations of . . . [these events] are truly breathtaking.”{{pg|487|488}}

This speaks well of Mailer’s journalistic sensibilities and his hope to avoid a
forest of inaccuracies himself. To this end, it is important to recall that ''Armies''
won a Polk Award for excellence in journalism.

One of the achievements of ''Armies'' is that in it Mailer is able to designate the marchers as patriots, a far cry from the criticism that labeled them “draft
dodgers,” “communists,” and “rabble rousers.” In contrast, Mailer describes draft resisters as moral and courageous: “by handing in draft cards, these
young men were committing their future either to prison, emigration, frustration,
or at best, years where everything must be unknown, and that spoke
of a readiness to take moral leaps . . . [and a] faith in one’s ability to react with
grace."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=88}} Mailer recasts draft dodgers as draft resisters, those willing to risk their lives for peace rather than war. Furthermore, Mailer aligns the march itself with America’s long tradition of ostensibly just and triumphant empire-building conflict. He describes the March on the Pentagon as a rite of passage and connects this to a collection of American moments that could be understood as similar rites of passage, for “each generation
of Americans had forged their own rite, in the forest of the Alleghenies and the Adirondacks, at Valley Forge, at New Orleans in 1812, with Rogers and Clark or at Sutter’s Mill, at Gettysburg, the Alamo, the Klondike, the Argonne, Normandy, Pusan."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=308}} Such a comparison implies that without undergoing such crises the U.S. would not have become a sovereign republic, and so the March on the Pentagon is figured as another historic challenge for the country. This lofty rhetoric is meant to stir a reader’s patriotic sympathies, and Mailer is determined that his audience will see the marchers not as subversives but as patriots within the traditions of American democracy.

Mailer understood that “to affect consciousness is thus to shape power” and that his words were shaping people’s perception of the anti-war movement.
Even if his readers were persuaded to believe in a peaceful resolution to the Vietnam War, what would these readers do with this new consciousness,
a consciousness which was “itself a central ingredient in power”{{sfn|Miller|year|p=394}}? It is difficult to measure how readers enact their power, but we can watch how Mailer enacts his own. He undertakes his own civil disobedience, getting arrested in hopes of gaining publicity and offering credence to the
cause of the march, and he understands that his symbolic action must be captured by the press to multiply its effect. When writing the story of ''Armies'', Mailer tracks his own movement from critic to supporter to war protester to{{pg|488|489}}

prisoner of conscience, and we see that he “feels the claims of imagination
as urgently as the claims of action,"{{sfn|Behar|1970|p=262}} and so he must both examine and act.

''Armies'' represents, for Mailer, a test of his moral strength, an examination of whether Mailer could stand behind his highest moral principles. The story of ''Armies'' offers a way for Mailer to put his philosophy into action and to answer the question, Are you willing to put your life on the line? David Wyatt calls Mailer “a man so obsessed by courage,” which is a persistent theme in Mailer’s famous essay “The White Negro” (1957).{{sfn|Wyatt|2008|p=318}} In many ways ''Armies'' is tied to all of Mailer’s preceding writing. The most obvious connection is to ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' (1967), but the themes and challenges of ''Armies'' are also indebted to ''Cannibals and Christians'' (1966) and ''The Presidential Papers'' (1963). These books variously tested the warrior in Mailer. Even his first book, ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948), plays a role in the conception of ''Armies''. Mary Dearborn claims that ''Armies'' is a recapitulation of his first novel bringing up questions of “confrontation with and the reaction to authority."{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=244}} In ''Armies'', Mailer’s critique of structures of power and his own civil disobedience stands in clear defiance of authoritarian establishments, the same authoritarian establishments which thwarted characters in his previous texts. Mailer’s working out of his own demons in this
journey from author to activist was also meant to engage the hearts and minds of his readers in the important business of opening their eyes to the truth about the war in Vietnam. But it is not just a story about Mailer or the many Mailer characters; Mailer serves as an entry to the predicament of the war in Vietnam and a people’s various ways to protest it.

Mailer admits early in the story his growing belief that his own writing about the Vietnam War is not enough, that “no project had seemed to cost
him enough,” for his writing was one thing, but action was another. And by simply writing about the Vietnam War “he had been suffering more and more in the past few years from the private conviction that he was getting a
little soft, a hint curdled."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=70–1}} This may have served as a barb at
his audience of readers, among whom surely numbered many armchair revolutionaries.
To keep from getting soft and to resist being contented with a
writer’s perspective, he had to move into action himself. He had to actually
take part in the demonstrations, to be physically, not just ideologically in
opposition to the war, but we are not meant to concentrate solely on Mailer’s own struggle. Rather, from his own story of activism he may bring about in {{pg|489|490}}

his readers a new understanding that through the act of reading one becomes
aware, but not yet ''involved'' in a cause. Readers might appreciate that having their consciousness raised was not the same as protesting the war in
their own communities, not at all the same as stepping out into the streets
to form a human protest. One had to move from words to action, from page to protest.

Mailer asks serious questions of his readers, as Alfred Kazin points out, describing him as the first “leading American peacenik and resister addressing urgent questions to his ‘army’—Are we good enough? How can we overcome
the ‘mediocrity of the middle-class middle-aged masses of the Left?’
The general shoddiness of American standards just now? The tendency of authorities to lie?”{{sfn|Kazin|1968|p=BR 1}} Mailer artfully places such questions within the
framework of a narrative, addressed not only to fellow peaceniks but also to
a popular readership. It was important that this novel travel beyond the Left community, and it did. Indeed, ''Armies'' “reestablished Mailer with a wide audience"{{sfn|Whalen-Bridge|2003|p=217}} and won both the Pulitzer Prize for General
Nonfiction and the National Book Award. And it was gaining a popular audience
(a readership made up of more than those on the Left) for this topic
that was a challenge for Mailer: “walking the parapet between the intellectual
and the popular, and Mailer with his dream of making ‘a revolution in
the consciousness of our time’ is too ambitious to settle for a minority ‘art’
audience."{{sfn|Radford|1983|p=230}} Mailer was ambitious enough to take on the challenge
of telling a story that those within the anti-war movement would rally
around and those outside would give a fair hearing.

The novel, first in serial and then in book form, was meant to prod readers to action. In fact, it is specifically the expansiveness of the novel genre that Mailer finds useful toward a moral end. Mailer understood the great
potential of the genre. In one interview he contends that “art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people. In particular,
I think the novel is at its best the most moral of the art forms because
it’s the most immediate, the most overbearing . . . It is the most
inescapable."{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=384}} Did Mailer’s readers find his story
inescapable, and if so, were they catalyzed to protest the war themselves? The
answer cannot easily be quantified. We can, however, study the way in which Norman Mailer tried to activate readers. Critics picked up on this hunger
of Mailer’s to make change, his “extra-literary hunger for things to change
and change now, in palpable ways rather than in the imaginary, alternative{{pg|490|491}}

ways in which most artist-novelists deal."{{sfn|Gilman|1968|p=27}} This book is not only
a testimony of civil disobedience but also a story which aims to engender civil disobedience in the reader.

Wherever readers stood on the political continuum, ''Armies'' invites readers
to justify events in the book with their real lives; it allows for “[r]eading
history over the edge of text,” which is a combination of “close reading and
analysis that allow us to get ‘inside’ the narrative, while at the same time we
understand that the narrators and subjects of nonfiction . . . live ‘outside’ the
narrative as well."{{sfn|Lehman|1997|p=3}} This makes for an intense reading experience,
especially if the novelist like Mailer uses his skills to capture an already fascinating
or contentious event. One other factor that might have turned contemporary
readers into implicated readers was the timeliness of the book’s
release: the march was more than mere history it was a recent event when the book was published just seven months after the event—and the controversy
over Vietnam still raged on.

In a nonfiction novel such as ''Armies''the story can take on very real manifestations,
which could lead to political action on the part of readers. A
reader could take measure of his or her own (in)action regarding the war
and choose to act out against the war. Such action is difficult to trace, but in
the case of ''Armies'', Rubin claims the novel “became the Bible of the movement”{{sfn|Manso|1985|p=461}}; Dearborn suggests that “young leftists found it an astute
analysis and were impressed by the passion Mailer brought to the work."{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=246}} However, Michael Albert and Noam Chomsky, both major figures in
the anti-war movement, didn’t feel that it made much of an impact within
the movement. Albert recalls “honestly, I doubt if anyone I knew or virtually
anyone in the movement read it, even I didn’t. My guess would be it had [a]
very very modest impact . . . and virtually none inside the movement per
se.” While it is unclear whether it affected those within the movement, it is also difficult to tell how it affected readers just becoming acquainted with the
peace movement. Dearborn indicates that those outside the movement were
touched by the novel: “across the political spectrum, readers who watched
the student movement with varying degrees of approval or censure were
made to understand that what was going on in the streets . . . was a real phenomenon
that had to be taken extremely seriously."{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=246}} Furthermore, the
Pulitzer and National Book Award, which were because of the novel, are a
sort of establishment seals of approval—proof that it had reached middle
America. Contemporary reviewers were generous with their praise. The
{{pg|491|492}}

''London Magazine'' named him “the best living writer of English prose."{{sfn|Bergonzi|1968|p=100}} Others saw ''Armies'' saw as a monumental book, “a literary act
whose significance is certain to grow."{{sfn|Gilman|1968|p=27}} One way the book could
live on was through the reactions of its readers.

Not only was ''Armies'' about politics, but the novel stood as a statement of
the relationship between literature and politics. To ignore politics, for the novelist, is an error. Mailer must speak politically, for “the separation of the
literary and political horizons is a mute acceptance of the structures through
which power is exercised."{{sfn|Schueller|1992|p=127}} Whether his novel convinced one
single person to join the anti-war cause or not, it was a necessary testimony. Simply by representing the happenings of the anti-war movement in narrative
form, Mailer made a new current in American politics. Perhaps Mailer
understood the inescapability of politics, for as an activist author he could
not “dissociate himself from the social contexts through which he speaks."{{sfn|Schueller|1992|p=125}} His story would be null without its complex entanglement with real political struggle.

A contemporary review of ''Armies'' in ''The Nation'' called it “a permanent contribution to our literature—a unique testimony to literary responsiveness and responsibility”{{sfn|Trachtenberg|1968|p=702}}; certainly, Mailer was responding to
important political phenomena that had not received sustained literary attention.
His writing about the rifts within the tumultuous New Left, the division
between Americans for and against the war, and the response of
government and the press to the anti-war movement did delineate important
political issues that needed to be aired. Mailer did not shy away from critique of the government or the media or of himself in order to tell the story of those in the anti-war movement.

Mailer’s novel represents a catalyst for social change through its introduction
of an anti-war subculture to a popular audience. Mailer speaks candidly
about his intentions: “I was trying to bring a consciousness to America
about the war in Vietnam. . . . I think the effect of the book was to make resistance to the war in Vietnam a little more human to people who were still supporting the war. So, yes, I think the book did have a political effect. Maybe it tended to strengthen the side opposed to the war in Vietnam."{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=220}} Jason Epstein recalls ''Armies'' as a book “meant to rally or produce a political reaction”{{sfn|Manso|1985|p=470}}; a strong argument can be made for the fact that Mailer meant to catalyze his readers. He attested to the disorganization
and dissension within the anti-war camp, but more vigorously{{pg|492|493}}
showed the misrepresentation, defamation, and even the physical denigration
of the activists. His argument for peace in Vietnam gained stature because he was a bona fide activist for the cause, facing arrest to further the significance of his protest. He was there, present at the march, and authenticated his action by telling the story of the march. ''The Armies of the Night'' exists as a testament to the anti-war movement and to the efficacy of civil disobedience.

===Citations===
{{reflist|20em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin}}
* {{citation
| last = Albert
| first = Michael
| title = A Referral from Noam Chomsky
| date = 10 November 2009
| publisher = Message to Katharine Westaway. E-mail.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Baker
| first = Russell
| title = Observer: Dove Antics
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 24 October 1967
| page = 45
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Behar
| first = Jack
| title = History and Fiction
| journal = NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction
| volume = 3
| issue = 3
| year = 1970
| pages = 260–265
| ref = harv
}}
*{{cite magazine
| last = Bergonzi
| first = Bernard
| title = Selected Books
| magazine = London Magazine
| date = November 1968
| pages = 98–100
| quote = Rev. of ''Cannibals and Christians'' and ''Armies of the Night,'' by Norman Mailer.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Dearborn
| first = Mary V.
| title = Mailer: A Biography
| publisher = Houghton Mifflin
| location = Boston
| year = 1999
| ref = harv
}}
* {{citation
| last = Fontaine
| first = Dick
| title = Question for Dick Fontaine
| date = 1 April 2009
| publisher = Message to Katharine Westaway. E-mail.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| editor-last = Gallup
| editor-first = George Horace
| title = Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1935–1971
| volume = 3
| publisher = Random House
| location = New York
| year = 1972
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Gilman
| first = Richard
| title = What Mailer Has Done
| magazine = The New Republic
| date = 8 June 1968
| pages = 27–31
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Isserman
| first = Maurice
| title = The Flower and the Gun
| magazine = The Chronicle of Higher Education
| date = 19 October 2007
| pages = B14–B15
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Kazin
| first = Alfred
| title = The Trouble He’s Seen
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 5 May 1968
| page = BR1
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Lehman
| first = Daniel W.
| title = Matters of Fact: Reading Nonfiction over the Edge
| publisher = Ohio State UP
| location = Columbus
| year = 1997
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = MacFarlane
| first = Scott
| title = The Hippie Narrative: A Literary Perspective on the Counterculture
| publisher = McFarland
| location = Jefferson
| year = 2007
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Mailer
| first = Norman
| title = Advertisements for Myself
| publisher = G. P. Putnam’s Sons
| location = New York
| year = 1959
| ref = harv
}}
* ———. {{cite book
| author =
| title = Existential Aesthetics: An Interview with Norman Mailer
| others = Interview by Laura Adams
| editor-last = Lennon
| editor-first = J. Michael
| book-title = Conversations with Norman Mailer
| publisher = UP of Mississippi
| location = Jackson
| year = 1988
| pages = 207–227
| quote = Rpt. of "Existential Aesthetics: An Interview with Norman Mailer." ''Partisan Review'' 42.2 (1975): 197–214.
| ref = harv
}}
* ———. {{cite book
| author =
| chapter = Prisoner of Success: An Interview with Paul Attanasio
| editor-last = Lennon
| editor-first = J. Michael
| title = Pieces and Pontifications
| publisher = Little, Brown & Company
| location = Boston
| year = 1982
| pages = 129–136
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Manso
| first = Peter
| title = Norman Mailer: His Life and Times
| publisher = Simon and Schuster
| location = New York
| year = 1985
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Miller
| first = Joshua
| title = No Success Like Failure: Existential Politics in Norman Mailer’s ''The Armies of the Night''
| journal = Polity
| volume = 22
| issue = 3
| year = 1990
| pages = 379–396
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Radford
| first = Jean
| chapter = Norman Mailer: The True Story of an American Writer
| editor-last = Gray
| editor-first = Richard
| title = American Fiction: New Readings
| publisher = Vision Press
| location = London
| year = 1983
| pages = 222–237
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Reston
| first = James
| title = Everyone is a Loser
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 23 October 1967
| page = 1
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Roberts
| first = Gene
| title = Wallace Derides War Protesters
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 29 October 1967
| page = 45
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Schueller
| first = Malini Johar
| title = The Politics of Voice: Liberalism and Social Criticism from Franklin to Kingston
| publisher = State University of New York Press
| location = Albany
| year = 1992
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Scott
| first = Nathan A.
| title = Three American Moralists: Mailer, Bellow, Trilling
| publisher = U of Notre Dame P
| location = Notre Dame
| year = 1973
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Small
| first = Melvin
| title = Covering Dissent: The Media and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement
| publisher = Rutgers UP
| location = New Brunswick
| year = 1994
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Streitmatter
| first = Rodger
| title = Mightier Than the Sword: How the News Media Have Shaped American History
| publisher = Westview
| location = Boulder
| year = 1997
| ref = harv
}}
* ———. {{cite book
| author =
| title = Voices of Revolution: The Dissident Press in America
| publisher = Columbia UP
| location = New York
| year = 2001
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Trachtenberg
| first = Alan
| title = Mailer on the Steps of the Pentagon
| magazine = The Nation
| date = 27 May 1968
| pages = 701–702
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Wells
| first = Tom
| title = The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam
| publisher = U of California P
| location = Berkeley
| year = 1994
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Whalen-Bridge
| first = John
| chapter = Norman Mailer
| editor-first = James R.
| editor-last = Giles
| editor2-first = Wanda H.
| editor2-last = Giles
| title = American Novelists Since World War II. Seventh Series
| series = Dictionary of Literary Biography
| volume = 278
| publisher = Gale Group
| location = New York
| year = 2003
| pages = 217–232
| quote = Vol. 278 of ''Dictionary of Literary Biography''. 357 vols. to date. 1978–.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Wyatt
| first = David
| title = Living Out the Sixties
| journal = The Hopkins Review
| volume = 1
| issue = 2
| year = 2008
| pages = 315–332
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last1 = Zaroulis
| first1 = Nancy
| last2 = Sullivan
| first2 = Gerald
| title = Who Spoke Up? American Protest Against the War in Vietnam 1963–1975
| publisher = Doubleday
| location = Garden City
| year = 1984
| ref = harv
}}
{{Refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:“A Noble Pursuit”: The Armies of the Night as Outside Agitator: }}
[[Category:Miscellany (MR)]]

User:Chelsey.brantley/sandbox

2025-04-19T15:27:43Z

Chelsey.brantley: Corrected type in first line

{{user sandbox|plain=yes}}

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}}

{{Byline|last=Westaway|first=Katharine|url=https://prmlr.us/mr07dick|abstract=Mailer has been . . . uniform edition.|note=This paper served . . . me to participate.}}

{{dc|dc=O|n a weekend in October of 1967,}} tens of thousands of demonstrators
amassed in Washington DC to protest the war in Vietnam. Intending ''The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History'' (1968) to record and commemorate this eventful weekend, Norman Mailer enlarged the march on the Pentagon’s meaning, working as a novelist to make it more
than a four-day set of tremors in the nation’s capital. Some consider the
march a watershed moment, “the first in a chain of events that led to Lyndon
Johnson’s decision . . . to deescalate in Vietnam."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=70}} Mailer’s
nonfiction novel carefully examines this defining event of American history.
Through Mailer’s dual role as a demonstrator and narrator, readers are provided
a rich witness to the many obstacles that were set before marchers in the form of a biased media and government officials opposed to the peace
movement, including the military and police whose physical abuse is featured in the novel.

''Armies'' is also concerned with a sweeping view of American culture ''vis-à-vis'' the march, for this is a “literary project . . . radically committed to a
rendering of the American reality”,{{sfn|Scott|1973|p=18}} and ''Armies'' becomes Mailer’s
attempt to expand upon the march’s implications for the national character.
When ''Armies'' was published, the country was divided over the war in Vietnam; according to a 1967 Gallup poll, when asked whether “the U.S. made a mistake sending troops to Vietnam” forty-six percent said yes while almost an equal amount, forty-four percent, answered no.{{sfn|Gallup|1972|p=2087}} Mailer addresses
the division over the war and also the disparaging of anti-war {{pg|483|484}}
protestors in the mainstream press which created a gulf between mainstream America and the anti-war movement: “from late 1967 into 1968 when Mailer wrote this book, open season on the ‘hippie’ had been tacitly declared."{{sfn|MacFarlane|2007|p=131}} Mailer works to familiarize the populace with these voices of
dissent and to humanize them. The cultural clashes Mailer depicts epitomize the volatility of the U.S. at that moment, the rips in the social fabric that were becoming obvious during the escalation of the Vietnam War.

I will also consider how this novel might have acted as a catalyst for activism
for some contemporary readers and how it worked to coalesce support for the anti-war movement, addressing those Americans who were either unsympathetic towards or even appalled by the anti-war protesters
and challenging readers to see the efficacy and patriotism of the marchers’ cause. It is difficult to gauge the novel’s effectiveness on this front, but I will
consider media coverage and popular reaction to the marchers and to the
book itself. It is in the novelistic form that Mailer shares this moment in history,
and he has said that the reading of novels “is a noble pursuit, that ideally
it profoundly changes the ways in which people perceive their
experience."{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=133}} Mailer understood the great possibility of his
novel to effect change and the opportunity he had to shape readers’ understanding
of what it meant to protest the war in Vietnam.

The political divide was so great in America in the late 1960s that Mailer may have felt obliged to explain one faction to another, to use as a didactic
tool; he was teaching about a counterculture, from which many Americans
were insulated. Scott MacFarlane measures the social turmoil of the times “at a level unseen since the Civil War. The book reading public was clamoring for insight into what was happening on the streets of America."{{sfn|MacFarlane|2007|p=133}} ''Armies'' was a new window into the anti-war movement. The mainstream
media kept Americans in the dark about the anti-war movement. Readers
were witness to Mailer’s own perspective of the counterculture which was not always exhortative: “It was the children in whom Mailer had some hope, a gloomy hope. These mad middle-class children with their lobotomies from
sin, their nihilistic embezzlement of all middle-class moral funds, their innocence,
their lust for apocalypse, their unbelievable indifference to waste."{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=44}} Mailer does not form saints out of the anti-war camp, and
one could not accuse Mailer of being an outright defender of the counterculture.
But through his intimate sketches of the activists and his own experience
as a fellow marcher, we do see images of greatness, of self-sacrifice and {{pg|484|485}}
patriotism. Most important, Mailer, as narrator/protagonist, gives Americans
outside the march a sense of what it was to be a demonstrator.

One of Mailer’s main tasks as an author is to acquaint his readers with the
character of the marchers themselves, so a primary concern of ''Armies'' is media bias as it affected the American public’s sentiments about the acts of resistance happening all around them. But the mainstream press was hawkish:
before the Tet Offensive in January of 1968, “not a single major newspaper
or television network call[ed] for the end to the war."{{sfn|Streitmatter|2001|p=197}} In fact, the mainstream media plainly opposed the anti-war effort “in the heady days early in the war when American correspondents doubled as government handmaidens, they openly condemned anti-war protesters as traitors."{{sfn|Streitmatter|1997|p=201}} This was the atmosphere in which
Mailer attempted to tell a moving tale of the anti-war movement.

Mailer renounces conventional journalism; he doesn’t trust the media to analyze the anti-war movement fairly. Media studies of the time show that
“throughout [the] various stages of escalating involvement, mainstream
American journalists supported the effort, serving as exuberant cheerleaders
for the military."{{sfn|Streitmatter|2001|p=184}} Mailer frequently points out
the unfair coverage that the press gave to the actions of the demonstrators
and how "[e]mphasis was put on every rock thrown, and a count was made of the windows broken. (There were, however, only a few.) But there was no
specific mention of The Wedge [a brutal crowd control technique, which resulted
in beating of the marchers]. Indeed, stories [of police brutality]
quickly disappeared."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=313-14}} This becomes evident as Mailer distinguishes
the reporting of mainstream press from that of the alternative
press. The alternative press (such as the ''Catholic Worker'', ''I.F. Stone’s Weekly,
''National Guardian'', and ''Ramparts'') was critical of the war going back in some
cases to the 1950s when troops were first deployed to Vietnam.{{sfn|Streitmatter|2001|p=184}}

One of the most damning charges in the book is the brutality perpetrated
against the marchers, who were for the most part peacefully protesting; some
protestors were “clubbed until they were broken and bloody."{{sfn|Zaroulis and Sullivan|1984|p=138}} The abuse was amplified by the fact that it often went unreported.
For the reports of police violence, Mailer relies upon outside sources
because he had been arrested early in the demonstration before most of the
violence occurred. Yet he gains credibility when integrating outside witnesses
and reportage into a book that was mostly reported from his standpoint,{{pg|485|486}}
and these external sources may have lent more authority to the charge that
protesters were abused. For any journalist there was difficulty in covering
something as large as the march on the Pentagon “because of the extensive
terrain in question and the rapid movements of the protestors and soldiers."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=72}} Acting as a novelist-journalist, Mailer collects varied media accounts
of the march and weaves them into the narrative; here he features
one Leftist perspective of the march, identifying the witness as “Harvey
Mayes of the English Department at Hunter”:
<blockquote>One soldier spilled the water from his canteen on the ground in order to add to the discomfort of the female demonstrator at his feet. She cursed him—understandably, I think—and shifted her body. She lost her balance and her shoulder hit the rifle at the soldier’s side. He raised the rifle, and with its butt, came down hard on the girl’s leg. The girl tried to move back but was not fast enough to avoid the billy-club of a soldier in the second row of the troops. At least four times that soldier hit her with all his force.{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=303}}</blockquote>
Mailer was obliged to portray the graphic scenes from the march which were missing in many media reports. Perhaps the stories of abuse were reported on more by the Left media because the Left journalists were among the protestors, down in the tussle, while mainstream reporters observed from a safe
distance, avoiding a potential encounter with violent police.

Mailer also gave accounts of “the [mainstream] press [who were], in the
aftermath, antagonistic to the March” and so included passages of an article from the ''New York Times'' which stated that “[i]t is difficult to report publicly the ugly and vulgar provocation of many of the militants. They spat on some
of the soldiers in the front line at the Pentagon and goaded them with the most vicious personal slander. . . . [M]any officials here are surprised that
there was not much more violence."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=313}} Notice that the ''Times'' does not mention any specific violence of the MPs. Numerous commentators condemned ''not'' the beatings meted out to the demonstrators, but the protest
itself; David Brinkley called it a “coarse, vulgar episode."{{sfn|Wells|1994|p=202-3}} However,
Maurice Isserman, one marcher, remembers the marchers for the most part as peaceful, remaining “pretty true to Gandhian principles."{{sfn|Isserman|2007|p=B15}}

In looking beyond Mailer’s collection of media accounts of the march, it{{pg|486|487}}

is clear that he wasn’t exaggerating the bias against anti-war activists. The
''New York Times'' reported that Robert McNamara felt his soldiers showed “restraint . . . under provocation,"{{sfn|Reston|1967|p=1}} and in one article the protesters
were referred to as “scum of the universe”{{sfn|Roberts|1967|p=45}}; another report called the demonstration “mass paranoia . . . elicit[ing] a great deal of foolishness."{{sfn|Baker|1967|p=45}} What the press wrote about the protestors was not always so disparaging, but rarely was the message of the marchers given much time, and this sort of mainstream coverage was the only information readily
available to the general public about the anti-war movement. Some of the first reports of the march on and the siege of the Pentagon were missing reports of police violence because the reporters went home late Saturday
night before the police began employing more militant tactics. But on Monday in another story of the march the ''New York Times'' still ignored “the bloody military sweep of early Sunday morning;” the ''Washington Post''’s Monday coverage was similar in that it “continued to emphasize the violence
of the protestors, not the defenders of the Pentagon."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=76, 78}} ''Time'' came out with its story a few days after the march on October 27 in which they marginalized the protestors as “left-wing radicals, hippies, acid
heads, and people with painted faces in bizarre costumes” while at the same time “applaud[ing] the government for its restraint."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=79-80}}

Mailer is unwilling to let the picture that the mainstream press drew of demonstrators become the only permanent record, and“he scolded the press for their lies, and their misrepresentation, for their guilt in creating a psychology over the last twenty years in the average American which made wars like Vietnam possible."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=93}} Mailer understands that the press is pivotal in a nation’s critique of its culture and policies, and he takes the press to task for their failure to cultivate an informed public. Eventually, Mailer’s ''Armies'' would stand with media accounts as a record of the event. Before ''Armies'' was published as a book in 1968, it appeared in periodicals (almost the entire issues of ''Harper’s'' and ''Commentary'' were given to this story). So
Mailer responded to the mass media’s “forest of inaccuracy” first in popular periodicals and then in book form. According to Dick Fontaine, a British filmmaker who was filming a documentary of Mailer over the weekend of
the march, “Norman remembered, with frightening accuracy, minutes and minutes, pages and pages, of the dialogues he was having with the others, let alone, of course, the brilliant descriptions of time, place and mood. . . . His
memory and interpretations of . . . [these events] are truly breathtaking.”{{pg|487|488}}

This speaks well of Mailer’s journalistic sensibilities and his hope to avoid a
forest of inaccuracies himself. To this end, it is important to recall that ''Armies''
won a Polk Award for excellence in journalism.

One of the achievements of ''Armies'' is that in it Mailer is able to designate the marchers as patriots, a far cry from the criticism that labeled them “draft
dodgers,” “communists,” and “rabble rousers.” In contrast, Mailer describes draft resisters as moral and courageous: “by handing in draft cards, these
young men were committing their future either to prison, emigration, frustration,
or at best, years where everything must be unknown, and that spoke
of a readiness to take moral leaps . . . [and a] faith in one’s ability to react with
grace."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=88}} Mailer recasts draft dodgers as draft resisters, those willing to risk their lives for peace rather than war. Furthermore, Mailer aligns the march itself with America’s long tradition of ostensibly just and triumphant empire-building conflict. He describes the March on the Pentagon as a rite of passage and connects this to a collection of American moments that could be understood as similar rites of passage, for “each generation
of Americans had forged their own rite, in the forest of the Alleghenies and the Adirondacks, at Valley Forge, at New Orleans in 1812, with Rogers and Clark or at Sutter’s Mill, at Gettysburg, the Alamo, the Klondike, the Argonne, Normandy, Pusan."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=308}} Such a comparison implies that without undergoing such crises the U.S. would not have become a sovereign republic, and so the March on the Pentagon is figured as another historic challenge for the country. This lofty rhetoric is meant to stir a reader’s patriotic sympathies, and Mailer is determined that his audience will see the marchers not as subversives but as patriots within the traditions of American democracy.

Mailer understood that “to affect consciousness is thus to shape power” and that his words were shaping people’s perception of the anti-war movement.
Even if his readers were persuaded to believe in a peaceful resolution to the Vietnam War, what would these readers do with this new consciousness,
a consciousness which was “itself a central ingredient in power”{{sfn|Miller|year|p=394}}? It is difficult to measure how readers enact their power, but we can watch how Mailer enacts his own. He undertakes his own civil disobedience, getting arrested in hopes of gaining publicity and offering credence to the
cause of the march, and he understands that his symbolic action must be captured by the press to multiply its effect. When writing the story of ''Armies'',
Mailer tracks his own movement from critic to supporter to war protester to{{pg|488|489}}

prisoner of conscience, and we see that he “feels the claims of imagination
as urgently as the claims of action,"{{sfn|Behar|1970|p=262}} and so he must both examine and act.

''Armies'' represents, for Mailer, a test of his moral strength, an examination of whether Mailer could stand behind his highest moral principles. The story of ''Armies'' offers a way for Mailer to put his philosophy into action and to answer the question, Are you willing to put your life on the line? David Wyatt calls Mailer “a man so obsessed by courage,” which is a persistent theme in Mailer’s famous essay “The White Negro” (1957).{{sfn|Wyatt|2008|p=318}} In many ways ''Armies'' is tied to all of Mailer’s preceding writing. The most obvious connection is to ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' (1967), but the themes and challenges of ''Armies'' are also indebted to ''Cannibals and Christians'' (1966) and ''The Presidential Papers'' (1963). These books variously tested the warrior in Mailer. Even his first book, ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948), plays a role in the conception of ''Armies''. Mary Dearborn claims that ''Armies'' is a recapitulation of his first novel bringing up questions of “confrontation with and the reaction to authority."{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=244}} In ''Armies'', Mailer’s critique of structures of power and his own civil disobedience stands in clear defiance of authoritarian establishments, the same authoritarian establishments which thwarted characters in his previous texts. Mailer’s working out of his own demons in this
journey from author to activist was also meant to engage the hearts and minds of his readers in the important business of opening their eyes to the truth about the war in Vietnam. But it is not just a story about Mailer or the many Mailer characters; Mailer serves as an entry to the predicament of the war in Vietnam and a people’s various ways to protest it.

Mailer admits early in the story his growing belief that his own writing about the Vietnam War is not enough, that “no project had seemed to cost
him enough,” for his writing was one thing, but action was another. And by simply writing about the Vietnam War “he had been suffering more and more in the past few years from the private conviction that he was getting a
little soft, a hint curdled."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=70-1}} This may have served as a barb at
his audience of readers, among whom surely numbered many armchair revolutionaries.
To keep from getting soft and to resist being contented with a
writer’s perspective, he had to move into action himself. He had to actually
take part in the demonstrations, to be physically, not just ideologically in
opposition to the war, but we are not meant to concentrate solely on Mailer’s own struggle. Rather, from his own story of activism he may bring about in {{pg|489|490}}

his readers a new understanding that through the act of reading one becomes
aware, but not yet ''involved'' in a cause. Readers might appreciate that having their consciousness raised was not the same as protesting the war in
their own communities, not at all the same as stepping out into the streets
to form a human protest. One had to move from words to action, from page
to protest.

Mailer asks serious questions of his readers, as Alfred Kazin points out,
describing him as the first “leading American peacenik and resister addressing urgent questions to his ‘army’—Are we good enough? How can we overcome
the ‘mediocrity of the middle-class middle-aged masses of the Left?’
The general shoddiness of American standards just now? The tendency of authorities to lie?”{{sfn|Kazin|1968|p=BR 1}} Mailer artfully places such questions within the
framework of a narrative, addressed not only to fellow peaceniks but also to
a popular readership. It was important that this novel travel beyond the Left community, and it did. Indeed, ''Armies'' “reestablished Mailer with a wide audience"{{sfn|Whalen-Bridge|2003|p=217}} and won both the Pulitzer Prize for General
Nonfiction and the National Book Award. And it was gaining a popular audience
(a readership made up of more than those on the Left) for this topic
that was a challenge for Mailer: “walking the parapet between the intellectual
and the popular, and Mailer with his dream of making ‘a revolution in
the consciousness of our time’ is too ambitious to settle for a minority ‘art’
audience."{{sfn|Radford|1983|p=230}} Mailer was ambitious enough to take on the challenge
of telling a story that those within the anti-war movement would rally
around and those outside would give a fair hearing.

The novel, first in serial and then in book form, was meant to prod readers to action. In fact, it is specifically the expansiveness of the novel genre that Mailer finds useful toward a moral end. Mailer understood the great
potential of the genre. In one interview he contends that “art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people. In particular,
I think the novel is at its best the most moral of the art forms because
it’s the most immediate, the most overbearing . . . It is the most
inescapable."{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=384}} Did Mailer’s readers find his story
inescapable, and if so, were they catalyzed to protest the war themselves? The
answer cannot easily be quantified. We can, however, study the way in which Norman Mailer tried to activate readers. Critics picked up on this hunger
of Mailer’s to make change, his “extra-literary hunger for things to change
and change now, in palpable ways rather than in the imaginary, alternative{{pg|490|491}}

ways in which most artist-novelists deal."{{sfn|Gilman|1968|p=27}} This book is not only
a testimony of civil disobedience but also a story which aims to engender civil disobedience in the reader.

Wherever readers stood on the political continuum, ''Armies'' invites readers
to justify events in the book with their real lives; it allows for “[r]eading
history over the edge of text,” which is a combination of “close reading and
analysis that allow us to get ‘inside’ the narrative, while at the same time we
understand that the narrators and subjects of nonfiction . . . live ‘outside’ the
narrative as well."{{sfn|Lehman|1997|p=3}} This makes for an intense reading experience,
especially if the novelist like Mailer uses his skills to capture an already fascinating
or contentious event. One other factor that might have turned contemporary
readers into implicated readers was the timeliness of the book’s
release: the march was more than mere history it was a recent event when the book was published just seven months after the event—and the controversy
over Vietnam still raged on.

In a nonfiction novel such as ''Armies''the story can take on very real manifestations,
which could lead to political action on the part of readers. A
reader could take measure of his or her own (in)action regarding the war
and choose to act out against the war. Such action is difficult to trace, but in
the case of ''Armies'', Rubin claims the novel “became the Bible of the movement”{{sfn|Manso|1985|p=461}}; Dearborn suggests that “young leftists found it an astute
analysis and were impressed by the passion Mailer brought to the work."{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=246}} However, Michael Albert and Noam Chomsky, both major figures in
the anti-war movement, didn’t feel that it made much of an impact within
the movement. Albert recalls “honestly, I doubt if anyone I knew or virtually
anyone in the movement read it, even I didn’t. My guess would be it had [a]
very very modest impact . . . and virtually none inside the movement per
se.” While it is unclear whether it affected those within the movement, it is also difficult to tell how it affected readers just becoming acquainted with the
peace movement. Dearborn indicates that those outside the movement were
touched by the novel: “across the political spectrum, readers who watched
the student movement with varying degrees of approval or censure were
made to understand that what was going on in the streets . . . was a real phenomenon
that had to be taken extremely seriously."{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=246}} Furthermore, the
Pulitzer and National Book Award, which were because of the novel, are a
sort of establishment seals of approval—proof that it had reached middle
America. Contemporary reviewers were generous with their praise. The
{{pg|491|492}}

''London Magazine'' named him “the best living writer of English prose."{{sfn|Bergonzi|1968|p=100}} Others saw ''Armies'' saw as a monumental book, “a literary act
whose significance is certain to grow."{{sfn|Gilman|1968|p=27}} One way the book could
live on was through the reactions of its readers.

Not only was ''Armies'' about politics, but the novel stood as a statement of
the relationship between literature and politics. To ignore politics, for the novelist, is an error. Mailer must speak politically, for “the separation of the
literary and political horizons is a mute acceptance of the structures through
which power is exercised."{{sfn|Schueller|1992|p=127}} Whether his novel convinced one
single person to join the anti-war cause or not, it was a necessary testimony. Simply by representing the happenings of the anti-war movement in narrative
form, Mailer made a new current in American politics. Perhaps Mailer
understood the inescapability of politics, for as an activist author he could
not “dissociate himself from the social contexts through which he speaks."{{sfn|Schueller|1992|p=125}} His story would be null without its complex entanglement with real political struggle.

A contemporary review of ''Armies'' in ''The Nation'' called it “a permanent contribution to our literature—a unique testimony to literary responsiveness and responsibility”{{sfn|Trachtenberg|1968|p=702}}; certainly, Mailer was responding to
important political phenomena that had not received sustained literary attention.
His writing about the rifts within the tumultuous New Left, the division
between Americans for and against the war, and the response of
government and the press to the anti-war movement did delineate important
political issues that needed to be aired. Mailer did not shy away from critique of the government or the media or of himself in order to tell the story of those in the anti-war movement.

Mailer’s novel represents a catalyst for social change through its introduction
of an anti-war subculture to a popular audience. Mailer speaks candidly
about his intentions: “I was trying to bring a consciousness to America
about the war in Vietnam. . . . I think the effect of the book was to make resistance to the war in Vietnam a little more human to people who were still supporting the war. So, yes, I think the book did have a political effect. Maybe it tended to strengthen the side opposed to the war in Vietnam."{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=220}} Jason Epstein recalls ''Armies'' as a book “meant to rally or produce a political reaction”{{sfn|Manso|1985|p=470}}; a strong argument can be made for the fact that Mailer meant to catalyze his readers. He attested to the disorganization
and dissension within the anti-war camp, but more vigorously{{pg|492|493}}
showed the misrepresentation, defamation, and even the physical denigration
of the activists. His argument for peace in Vietnam gained stature because he was a bona fide activist for the cause, facing arrest to further the significance of his protest. He was there, present at the march, and authenticated his action by telling the story of the march. ''The Armies of the Night'' exists as a testament to the anti-war movement and to the efficacy of civil disobedience.

===Citations===
{{reflist|20em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin}}
* {{citation
| last = Albert
| first = Michael
| title = A Referral from Noam Chomsky
| date = 10 November 2009
| publisher = Message to Katharine Westaway. E-mail.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Baker
| first = Russell
| title = Observer: Dove Antics
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 24 October 1967
| page = 45
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Behar
| first = Jack
| title = History and Fiction
| journal = NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction
| volume = 3
| issue = 3
| year = 1970
| pages = 260–265
| ref = harv
}}
*{{cite magazine
| last = Bergonzi
| first = Bernard
| title = Selected Books
| magazine = London Magazine
| date = November 1968
| pages = 98–100
| quote = Rev. of ''Cannibals and Christians'' and ''Armies of the Night,'' by Norman Mailer.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Dearborn
| first = Mary V.
| title = Mailer: A Biography
| publisher = Houghton Mifflin
| location = Boston
| year = 1999
| ref = harv
}}
* {{citation
| last = Fontaine
| first = Dick
| title = Question for Dick Fontaine
| date = 1 April 2009
| publisher = Message to Katharine Westaway. E-mail.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| editor-last = Gallup
| editor-first = George Horace
| title = Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1935–1971
| volume = 3
| publisher = Random House
| location = New York
| year = 1972
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Gilman
| first = Richard
| title = What Mailer Has Done
| magazine = The New Republic
| date = 8 June 1968
| pages = 27–31
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Isserman
| first = Maurice
| title = The Flower and the Gun
| magazine = The Chronicle of Higher Education
| date = 19 October 2007
| pages = B14–B15
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Kazin
| first = Alfred
| title = The Trouble He’s Seen
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 5 May 1968
| page = BR1
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Lehman
| first = Daniel W.
| title = Matters of Fact: Reading Nonfiction over the Edge
| publisher = Ohio State UP
| location = Columbus
| year = 1997
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = MacFarlane
| first = Scott
| title = The Hippie Narrative: A Literary Perspective on the Counterculture
| publisher = McFarland
| location = Jefferson
| year = 2007
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Mailer
| first = Norman
| title = Advertisements for Myself
| publisher = G. P. Putnam’s Sons
| location = New York
| year = 1959
| ref = harv
}}
* ———. {{cite book
| author =
| title = Existential Aesthetics: An Interview with Norman Mailer
| others = Interview by Laura Adams
| editor-last = Lennon
| editor-first = J. Michael
| book-title = Conversations with Norman Mailer
| publisher = UP of Mississippi
| location = Jackson
| year = 1988
| pages = 207–227
| quote = Rpt. of "Existential Aesthetics: An Interview with Norman Mailer." ''Partisan Review'' 42.2 (1975): 197–214.
| ref = harv
}}
* ———. {{cite book
| author =
| chapter = Prisoner of Success: An Interview with Paul Attanasio
| editor-last = Lennon
| editor-first = J. Michael
| title = Pieces and Pontifications
| publisher = Little, Brown & Company
| location = Boston
| year = 1982
| pages = 129–136
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Manso
| first = Peter
| title = Norman Mailer: His Life and Times
| publisher = Simon and Schuster
| location = New York
| year = 1985
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Miller
| first = Joshua
| title = No Success Like Failure: Existential Politics in Norman Mailer’s ''The Armies of the Night''
| journal = Polity
| volume = 22
| issue = 3
| year = 1990
| pages = 379–396
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Radford
| first = Jean
| chapter = Norman Mailer: The True Story of an American Writer
| editor-last = Gray
| editor-first = Richard
| title = American Fiction: New Readings
| publisher = Vision Press
| location = London
| year = 1983
| pages = 222–237
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Reston
| first = James
| title = Everyone is a Loser
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 23 October 1967
| page = 1
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Roberts
| first = Gene
| title = Wallace Derides War Protesters
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 29 October 1967
| page = 45
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Schueller
| first = Malini Johar
| title = The Politics of Voice: Liberalism and Social Criticism from Franklin to Kingston
| publisher = State University of New York Press
| location = Albany
| year = 1992
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Scott
| first = Nathan A.
| title = Three American Moralists: Mailer, Bellow, Trilling
| publisher = U of Notre Dame P
| location = Notre Dame
| year = 1973
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Small
| first = Melvin
| title = Covering Dissent: The Media and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement
| publisher = Rutgers UP
| location = New Brunswick
| year = 1994
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Streitmatter
| first = Rodger
| title = Mightier Than the Sword: How the News Media Have Shaped American History
| publisher = Westview
| location = Boulder
| year = 1997
| ref = harv
}}
* ———. {{cite book
| author =
| title = Voices of Revolution: The Dissident Press in America
| publisher = Columbia UP
| location = New York
| year = 2001
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Trachtenberg
| first = Alan
| title = Mailer on the Steps of the Pentagon
| magazine = The Nation
| date = 27 May 1968
| pages = 701–702
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Wells
| first = Tom
| title = The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam
| publisher = U of California P
| location = Berkeley
| year = 1994
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Whalen-Bridge
| first = John
| chapter = Norman Mailer
| editor-first = James R.
| editor-last = Giles
| editor2-first = Wanda H.
| editor2-last = Giles
| title = American Novelists Since World War II. Seventh Series
| series = Dictionary of Literary Biography
| volume = 278
| publisher = Gale Group
| location = New York
| year = 2003
| pages = 217–232
| quote = Vol. 278 of ''Dictionary of Literary Biography''. 357 vols. to date. 1978–.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Wyatt
| first = David
| title = Living Out the Sixties
| journal = The Hopkins Review
| volume = 1
| issue = 2
| year = 2008
| pages = 315–332
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last1 = Zaroulis
| first1 = Nancy
| last2 = Sullivan
| first2 = Gerald
| title = Who Spoke Up? American Protest Against the War in Vietnam 1963–1975
| publisher = Doubleday
| location = Garden City
| year = 1984
| ref = harv
}}
{{Refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:“A Noble Pursuit”: The Armies of the Night as Outside Agitator: }}
[[Category:Miscellany (MR)]]

User:Chelsey.brantley/sandbox

2025-04-19T15:25:33Z

Chelsey.brantley: Added final page numbers and paragraph

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{{Working}}
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{{Byline|last=Westaway|first=Katharine|url=https://prmlr.us/mr07dick|abstract=Mailer has been . . . uniform edition.|note=This paper served . . . me to participate.}}

{{dc|dc=O|n a in weekend in October of 1967,}} tens of thousands of demonstrators
amassed in Washington DC to protest the war in Vietnam. Intending ''The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History'' (1968) to record and commemorate this eventful weekend, Norman Mailer enlarged the march on the Pentagon’s meaning, working as a novelist to make it more
than a four-day set of tremors in the nation’s capital. Some consider the
march a watershed moment, “the first in a chain of events that led to Lyndon
Johnson’s decision . . . to deescalate in Vietnam."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=70}} Mailer’s
nonfiction novel carefully examines this defining event of American history.
Through Mailer’s dual role as a demonstrator and narrator, readers are provided
a rich witness to the many obstacles that were set before marchers in the form of a biased media and government officials opposed to the peace
movement, including the military and police whose physical abuse is featured in the novel.

''Armies'' is also concerned with a sweeping view of American culture ''vis-à-vis'' the march, for this is a “literary project . . . radically committed to a
rendering of the American reality”,{{sfn|Scott|1973|p=18}} and ''Armies'' becomes Mailer’s
attempt to expand upon the march’s implications for the national character.
When ''Armies'' was published, the country was divided over the war in Vietnam; according to a 1967 Gallup poll, when asked whether “the U.S. made a mistake sending troops to Vietnam” forty-six percent said yes while almost an equal amount, forty-four percent, answered no.{{sfn|Gallup|1972|p=2087}} Mailer addresses
the division over the war and also the disparaging of anti-war {{pg|483|484}}
protestors in the mainstream press which created a gulf between mainstream America and the anti-war movement: “from late 1967 into 1968 when Mailer wrote this book, open season on the ‘hippie’ had been tacitly declared."{{sfn|MacFarlane|2007|p=131}} Mailer works to familiarize the populace with these voices of
dissent and to humanize them. The cultural clashes Mailer depicts epitomize the volatility of the U.S. at that moment, the rips in the social fabric that were becoming obvious during the escalation of the Vietnam War.

I will also consider how this novel might have acted as a catalyst for activism
for some contemporary readers and how it worked to coalesce support for the anti-war movement, addressing those Americans who were either unsympathetic towards or even appalled by the anti-war protesters
and challenging readers to see the efficacy and patriotism of the marchers’ cause. It is difficult to gauge the novel’s effectiveness on this front, but I will
consider media coverage and popular reaction to the marchers and to the
book itself. It is in the novelistic form that Mailer shares this moment in history,
and he has said that the reading of novels “is a noble pursuit, that ideally
it profoundly changes the ways in which people perceive their
experience."{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=133}} Mailer understood the great possibility of his
novel to effect change and the opportunity he had to shape readers’ understanding
of what it meant to protest the war in Vietnam.

The political divide was so great in America in the late 1960s that Mailer may have felt obliged to explain one faction to another, to use as a didactic
tool; he was teaching about a counterculture, from which many Americans
were insulated. Scott MacFarlane measures the social turmoil of the times “at a level unseen since the Civil War. The book reading public was clamoring for insight into what was happening on the streets of America."{{sfn|MacFarlane|2007|p=133}} ''Armies'' was a new window into the anti-war movement. The mainstream
media kept Americans in the dark about the anti-war movement. Readers
were witness to Mailer’s own perspective of the counterculture which was not always exhortative: “It was the children in whom Mailer had some hope, a gloomy hope. These mad middle-class children with their lobotomies from
sin, their nihilistic embezzlement of all middle-class moral funds, their innocence,
their lust for apocalypse, their unbelievable indifference to waste."{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=44}} Mailer does not form saints out of the anti-war camp, and
one could not accuse Mailer of being an outright defender of the counterculture.
But through his intimate sketches of the activists and his own experience
as a fellow marcher, we do see images of greatness, of self-sacrifice and {{pg|484|485}}
patriotism. Most important, Mailer, as narrator/protagonist, gives Americans
outside the march a sense of what it was to be a demonstrator.

One of Mailer’s main tasks as an author is to acquaint his readers with the
character of the marchers themselves, so a primary concern of ''Armies'' is media bias as it affected the American public’s sentiments about the acts of resistance happening all around them. But the mainstream press was hawkish:
before the Tet Offensive in January of 1968, “not a single major newspaper
or television network call[ed] for the end to the war."{{sfn|Streitmatter|2001|p=197}} In fact, the mainstream media plainly opposed the anti-war effort “in the heady days early in the war when American correspondents doubled as government handmaidens, they openly condemned anti-war protesters as traitors."{{sfn|Streitmatter|1997|p=201}} This was the atmosphere in which
Mailer attempted to tell a moving tale of the anti-war movement.

Mailer renounces conventional journalism; he doesn’t trust the media to analyze the anti-war movement fairly. Media studies of the time show that
“throughout [the] various stages of escalating involvement, mainstream
American journalists supported the effort, serving as exuberant cheerleaders
for the military."{{sfn|Streitmatter|2001|p=184}} Mailer frequently points out
the unfair coverage that the press gave to the actions of the demonstrators
and how "[e]mphasis was put on every rock thrown, and a count was made of the windows broken. (There were, however, only a few.) But there was no
specific mention of The Wedge [a brutal crowd control technique, which resulted
in beating of the marchers]. Indeed, stories [of police brutality]
quickly disappeared."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=313-14}} This becomes evident as Mailer distinguishes
the reporting of mainstream press from that of the alternative
press. The alternative press (such as the ''Catholic Worker'', ''I.F. Stone’s Weekly,
''National Guardian'', and ''Ramparts'') was critical of the war going back in some
cases to the 1950s when troops were first deployed to Vietnam.{{sfn|Streitmatter|2001|p=184}}

One of the most damning charges in the book is the brutality perpetrated
against the marchers, who were for the most part peacefully protesting; some
protestors were “clubbed until they were broken and bloody."{{sfn|Zaroulis and Sullivan|1984|p=138}} The abuse was amplified by the fact that it often went unreported.
For the reports of police violence, Mailer relies upon outside sources
because he had been arrested early in the demonstration before most of the
violence occurred. Yet he gains credibility when integrating outside witnesses
and reportage into a book that was mostly reported from his standpoint,{{pg|485|486}}
and these external sources may have lent more authority to the charge that
protesters were abused. For any journalist there was difficulty in covering
something as large as the march on the Pentagon “because of the extensive
terrain in question and the rapid movements of the protestors and soldiers."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=72}} Acting as a novelist-journalist, Mailer collects varied media accounts
of the march and weaves them into the narrative; here he features
one Leftist perspective of the march, identifying the witness as “Harvey
Mayes of the English Department at Hunter”:
<blockquote>One soldier spilled the water from his canteen on the ground in order to add to the discomfort of the female demonstrator at his feet. She cursed him—understandably, I think—and shifted her body. She lost her balance and her shoulder hit the rifle at the soldier’s side. He raised the rifle, and with its butt, came down hard on the girl’s leg. The girl tried to move back but was not fast enough to avoid the billy-club of a soldier in the second row of the troops. At least four times that soldier hit her with all his force.{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=303}}</blockquote>
Mailer was obliged to portray the graphic scenes from the march which were missing in many media reports. Perhaps the stories of abuse were reported on more by the Left media because the Left journalists were among the protestors, down in the tussle, while mainstream reporters observed from a safe
distance, avoiding a potential encounter with violent police.

Mailer also gave accounts of “the [mainstream] press [who were], in the
aftermath, antagonistic to the March” and so included passages of an article from the ''New York Times'' which stated that “[i]t is difficult to report publicly the ugly and vulgar provocation of many of the militants. They spat on some
of the soldiers in the front line at the Pentagon and goaded them with the most vicious personal slander. . . . [M]any officials here are surprised that
there was not much more violence."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=313}} Notice that the ''Times'' does not mention any specific violence of the MPs. Numerous commentators condemned ''not'' the beatings meted out to the demonstrators, but the protest
itself; David Brinkley called it a “coarse, vulgar episode."{{sfn|Wells|1994|p=202-3}} However,
Maurice Isserman, one marcher, remembers the marchers for the most part as peaceful, remaining “pretty true to Gandhian principles."{{sfn|Isserman|2007|p=B15}}

In looking beyond Mailer’s collection of media accounts of the march, it{{pg|486|487}}

is clear that he wasn’t exaggerating the bias against anti-war activists. The
''New York Times'' reported that Robert McNamara felt his soldiers showed “restraint . . . under provocation,"{{sfn|Reston|1967|p=1}} and in one article the protesters
were referred to as “scum of the universe”{{sfn|Roberts|1967|p=45}}; another report called the demonstration “mass paranoia . . . elicit[ing] a great deal of foolishness."{{sfn|Baker|1967|p=45}} What the press wrote about the protestors was not always so disparaging, but rarely was the message of the marchers given much time, and this sort of mainstream coverage was the only information readily
available to the general public about the anti-war movement. Some of the first reports of the march on and the siege of the Pentagon were missing reports of police violence because the reporters went home late Saturday
night before the police began employing more militant tactics. But on Monday in another story of the march the ''New York Times'' still ignored “the bloody military sweep of early Sunday morning;” the ''Washington Post''’s Monday coverage was similar in that it “continued to emphasize the violence
of the protestors, not the defenders of the Pentagon."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=76, 78}} ''Time'' came out with its story a few days after the march on October 27 in which they marginalized the protestors as “left-wing radicals, hippies, acid
heads, and people with painted faces in bizarre costumes” while at the same time “applaud[ing] the government for its restraint."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=79-80}}

Mailer is unwilling to let the picture that the mainstream press drew of demonstrators become the only permanent record, and“he scolded the press for their lies, and their misrepresentation, for their guilt in creating a psychology over the last twenty years in the average American which made wars like Vietnam possible."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=93}} Mailer understands that the press is pivotal in a nation’s critique of its culture and policies, and he takes the press to task for their failure to cultivate an informed public. Eventually, Mailer’s ''Armies'' would stand with media accounts as a record of the event. Before ''Armies'' was published as a book in 1968, it appeared in periodicals (almost the entire issues of ''Harper’s'' and ''Commentary'' were given to this story). So
Mailer responded to the mass media’s “forest of inaccuracy” first in popular periodicals and then in book form. According to Dick Fontaine, a British filmmaker who was filming a documentary of Mailer over the weekend of
the march, “Norman remembered, with frightening accuracy, minutes and minutes, pages and pages, of the dialogues he was having with the others, let alone, of course, the brilliant descriptions of time, place and mood. . . . His
memory and interpretations of . . . [these events] are truly breathtaking.”{{pg|487|488}}

This speaks well of Mailer’s journalistic sensibilities and his hope to avoid a
forest of inaccuracies himself. To this end, it is important to recall that ''Armies''
won a Polk Award for excellence in journalism.

One of the achievements of ''Armies'' is that in it Mailer is able to designate the marchers as patriots, a far cry from the criticism that labeled them “draft
dodgers,” “communists,” and “rabble rousers.” In contrast, Mailer describes draft resisters as moral and courageous: “by handing in draft cards, these
young men were committing their future either to prison, emigration, frustration,
or at best, years where everything must be unknown, and that spoke
of a readiness to take moral leaps . . . [and a] faith in one’s ability to react with
grace."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=88}} Mailer recasts draft dodgers as draft resisters, those willing to risk their lives for peace rather than war. Furthermore, Mailer aligns the march itself with America’s long tradition of ostensibly just and triumphant empire-building conflict. He describes the March on the Pentagon as a rite of passage and connects this to a collection of American moments that could be understood as similar rites of passage, for “each generation
of Americans had forged their own rite, in the forest of the Alleghenies and the Adirondacks, at Valley Forge, at New Orleans in 1812, with Rogers and Clark or at Sutter’s Mill, at Gettysburg, the Alamo, the Klondike, the Argonne, Normandy, Pusan."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=308}} Such a comparison implies that without undergoing such crises the U.S. would not have become a sovereign republic, and so the March on the Pentagon is figured as another historic challenge for the country. This lofty rhetoric is meant to stir a reader’s patriotic sympathies, and Mailer is determined that his audience will see the marchers not as subversives but as patriots within the traditions of American democracy.

Mailer understood that “to affect consciousness is thus to shape power” and that his words were shaping people’s perception of the anti-war movement.
Even if his readers were persuaded to believe in a peaceful resolution to the Vietnam War, what would these readers do with this new consciousness,
a consciousness which was “itself a central ingredient in power”{{sfn|Miller|year|p=394}}? It is difficult to measure how readers enact their power, but we can watch how Mailer enacts his own. He undertakes his own civil disobedience, getting arrested in hopes of gaining publicity and offering credence to the
cause of the march, and he understands that his symbolic action must be captured by the press to multiply its effect. When writing the story of ''Armies'',
Mailer tracks his own movement from critic to supporter to war protester to{{pg|488|489}}

prisoner of conscience, and we see that he “feels the claims of imagination
as urgently as the claims of action,"{{sfn|Behar|1970|p=262}} and so he must both examine and act.

''Armies'' represents, for Mailer, a test of his moral strength, an examination of whether Mailer could stand behind his highest moral principles. The story of ''Armies'' offers a way for Mailer to put his philosophy into action and to answer the question, Are you willing to put your life on the line? David Wyatt calls Mailer “a man so obsessed by courage,” which is a persistent theme in Mailer’s famous essay “The White Negro” (1957).{{sfn|Wyatt|2008|p=318}} In many ways ''Armies'' is tied to all of Mailer’s preceding writing. The most obvious connection is to ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' (1967), but the themes and challenges of ''Armies'' are also indebted to ''Cannibals and Christians'' (1966) and ''The Presidential Papers'' (1963). These books variously tested the warrior in Mailer. Even his first book, ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948), plays a role in the conception of ''Armies''. Mary Dearborn claims that ''Armies'' is a recapitulation of his first novel bringing up questions of “confrontation with and the reaction to authority."{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=244}} In ''Armies'', Mailer’s critique of structures of power and his own civil disobedience stands in clear defiance of authoritarian establishments, the same authoritarian establishments which thwarted characters in his previous texts. Mailer’s working out of his own demons in this
journey from author to activist was also meant to engage the hearts and minds of his readers in the important business of opening their eyes to the truth about the war in Vietnam. But it is not just a story about Mailer or the many Mailer characters; Mailer serves as an entry to the predicament of the war in Vietnam and a people’s various ways to protest it.

Mailer admits early in the story his growing belief that his own writing about the Vietnam War is not enough, that “no project had seemed to cost
him enough,” for his writing was one thing, but action was another. And by simply writing about the Vietnam War “he had been suffering more and more in the past few years from the private conviction that he was getting a
little soft, a hint curdled."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=70-1}} This may have served as a barb at
his audience of readers, among whom surely numbered many armchair revolutionaries.
To keep from getting soft and to resist being contented with a
writer’s perspective, he had to move into action himself. He had to actually
take part in the demonstrations, to be physically, not just ideologically in
opposition to the war, but we are not meant to concentrate solely on Mailer’s own struggle. Rather, from his own story of activism he may bring about in {{pg|489|490}}

his readers a new understanding that through the act of reading one becomes
aware, but not yet ''involved'' in a cause. Readers might appreciate that having their consciousness raised was not the same as protesting the war in
their own communities, not at all the same as stepping out into the streets
to form a human protest. One had to move from words to action, from page
to protest.

Mailer asks serious questions of his readers, as Alfred Kazin points out,
describing him as the first “leading American peacenik and resister addressing urgent questions to his ‘army’—Are we good enough? How can we overcome
the ‘mediocrity of the middle-class middle-aged masses of the Left?’
The general shoddiness of American standards just now? The tendency of authorities to lie?”{{sfn|Kazin|1968|p=BR 1}} Mailer artfully places such questions within the
framework of a narrative, addressed not only to fellow peaceniks but also to
a popular readership. It was important that this novel travel beyond the Left community, and it did. Indeed, ''Armies'' “reestablished Mailer with a wide audience"{{sfn|Whalen-Bridge|2003|p=217}} and won both the Pulitzer Prize for General
Nonfiction and the National Book Award. And it was gaining a popular audience
(a readership made up of more than those on the Left) for this topic
that was a challenge for Mailer: “walking the parapet between the intellectual
and the popular, and Mailer with his dream of making ‘a revolution in
the consciousness of our time’ is too ambitious to settle for a minority ‘art’
audience."{{sfn|Radford|1983|p=230}} Mailer was ambitious enough to take on the challenge
of telling a story that those within the anti-war movement would rally
around and those outside would give a fair hearing.

The novel, first in serial and then in book form, was meant to prod readers to action. In fact, it is specifically the expansiveness of the novel genre that Mailer finds useful toward a moral end. Mailer understood the great
potential of the genre. In one interview he contends that “art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people. In particular,
I think the novel is at its best the most moral of the art forms because
it’s the most immediate, the most overbearing . . . It is the most
inescapable."{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=384}} Did Mailer’s readers find his story
inescapable, and if so, were they catalyzed to protest the war themselves? The
answer cannot easily be quantified. We can, however, study the way in which Norman Mailer tried to activate readers. Critics picked up on this hunger
of Mailer’s to make change, his “extra-literary hunger for things to change
and change now, in palpable ways rather than in the imaginary, alternative{{pg|490|491}}

ways in which most artist-novelists deal."{{sfn|Gilman|1968|p=27}} This book is not only
a testimony of civil disobedience but also a story which aims to engender civil disobedience in the reader.

Wherever readers stood on the political continuum, ''Armies'' invites readers
to justify events in the book with their real lives; it allows for “[r]eading
history over the edge of text,” which is a combination of “close reading and
analysis that allow us to get ‘inside’ the narrative, while at the same time we
understand that the narrators and subjects of nonfiction . . . live ‘outside’ the
narrative as well."{{sfn|Lehman|1997|p=3}} This makes for an intense reading experience,
especially if the novelist like Mailer uses his skills to capture an already fascinating
or contentious event. One other factor that might have turned contemporary
readers into implicated readers was the timeliness of the book’s
release: the march was more than mere history it was a recent event when the book was published just seven months after the event—and the controversy
over Vietnam still raged on.

In a nonfiction novel such as ''Armies''the story can take on very real manifestations,
which could lead to political action on the part of readers. A
reader could take measure of his or her own (in)action regarding the war
and choose to act out against the war. Such action is difficult to trace, but in
the case of ''Armies'', Rubin claims the novel “became the Bible of the movement”{{sfn|Manso|1985|p=461}}; Dearborn suggests that “young leftists found it an astute
analysis and were impressed by the passion Mailer brought to the work."{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=246}} However, Michael Albert and Noam Chomsky, both major figures in
the anti-war movement, didn’t feel that it made much of an impact within
the movement. Albert recalls “honestly, I doubt if anyone I knew or virtually
anyone in the movement read it, even I didn’t. My guess would be it had [a]
very very modest impact . . . and virtually none inside the movement per
se.” While it is unclear whether it affected those within the movement, it is also difficult to tell how it affected readers just becoming acquainted with the
peace movement. Dearborn indicates that those outside the movement were
touched by the novel: “across the political spectrum, readers who watched
the student movement with varying degrees of approval or censure were
made to understand that what was going on in the streets . . . was a real phenomenon
that had to be taken extremely seriously."{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=246}} Furthermore, the
Pulitzer and National Book Award, which were because of the novel, are a
sort of establishment seals of approval—proof that it had reached middle
America. Contemporary reviewers were generous with their praise. The
{{pg|491|492}}

''London Magazine'' named him “the best living writer of English prose."{{sfn|Bergonzi|1968|p=100}} Others saw ''Armies'' saw as a monumental book, “a literary act
whose significance is certain to grow."{{sfn|Gilman|1968|p=27}} One way the book could
live on was through the reactions of its readers.

Not only was ''Armies'' about politics, but the novel stood as a statement of
the relationship between literature and politics. To ignore politics, for the novelist, is an error. Mailer must speak politically, for “the separation of the
literary and political horizons is a mute acceptance of the structures through
which power is exercised."{{sfn|Schueller|1992|p=127}} Whether his novel convinced one
single person to join the anti-war cause or not, it was a necessary testimony. Simply by representing the happenings of the anti-war movement in narrative
form, Mailer made a new current in American politics. Perhaps Mailer
understood the inescapability of politics, for as an activist author he could
not “dissociate himself from the social contexts through which he speaks."{{sfn|Schueller|1992|p=125}} His story would be null without its complex entanglement with real political struggle.

A contemporary review of ''Armies'' in ''The Nation'' called it “a permanent contribution to our literature—a unique testimony to literary responsiveness and responsibility”{{sfn|Trachtenberg|1968|p=702}}; certainly, Mailer was responding to
important political phenomena that had not received sustained literary attention.
His writing about the rifts within the tumultuous New Left, the division
between Americans for and against the war, and the response of
government and the press to the anti-war movement did delineate important
political issues that needed to be aired. Mailer did not shy away from critique of the government or the media or of himself in order to tell the story of those in the anti-war movement.

Mailer’s novel represents a catalyst for social change through its introduction
of an anti-war subculture to a popular audience. Mailer speaks candidly
about his intentions: “I was trying to bring a consciousness to America
about the war in Vietnam. . . . I think the effect of the book was to make resistance to the war in Vietnam a little more human to people who were still supporting the war. So, yes, I think the book did have a political effect. Maybe it tended to strengthen the side opposed to the war in Vietnam."{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=220}} Jason Epstein recalls ''Armies'' as a book “meant to rally or produce a political reaction”{{sfn|Manso|1985|p=470}}; a strong argument can be made for the fact that Mailer meant to catalyze his readers. He attested to the disorganization
and dissension within the anti-war camp, but more vigorously{{pg|492|493}}
showed the misrepresentation, defamation, and even the physical denigration
of the activists. His argument for peace in Vietnam gained stature because he was a bona fide activist for the cause, facing arrest to further the significance of his protest. He was there, present at the march, and authenticated his action by telling the story of the march. ''The Armies of the Night'' exists as a testament to the anti-war movement and to the efficacy of civil disobedience.

===Citations===
{{reflist|20em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin}}
* {{citation
| last = Albert
| first = Michael
| title = A Referral from Noam Chomsky
| date = 10 November 2009
| publisher = Message to Katharine Westaway. E-mail.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Baker
| first = Russell
| title = Observer: Dove Antics
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 24 October 1967
| page = 45
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Behar
| first = Jack
| title = History and Fiction
| journal = NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction
| volume = 3
| issue = 3
| year = 1970
| pages = 260–265
| ref = harv
}}
*{{cite magazine
| last = Bergonzi
| first = Bernard
| title = Selected Books
| magazine = London Magazine
| date = November 1968
| pages = 98–100
| quote = Rev. of ''Cannibals and Christians'' and ''Armies of the Night,'' by Norman Mailer.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Dearborn
| first = Mary V.
| title = Mailer: A Biography
| publisher = Houghton Mifflin
| location = Boston
| year = 1999
| ref = harv
}}
* {{citation
| last = Fontaine
| first = Dick
| title = Question for Dick Fontaine
| date = 1 April 2009
| publisher = Message to Katharine Westaway. E-mail.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| editor-last = Gallup
| editor-first = George Horace
| title = Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1935–1971
| volume = 3
| publisher = Random House
| location = New York
| year = 1972
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Gilman
| first = Richard
| title = What Mailer Has Done
| magazine = The New Republic
| date = 8 June 1968
| pages = 27–31
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Isserman
| first = Maurice
| title = The Flower and the Gun
| magazine = The Chronicle of Higher Education
| date = 19 October 2007
| pages = B14–B15
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Kazin
| first = Alfred
| title = The Trouble He’s Seen
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 5 May 1968
| page = BR1
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Lehman
| first = Daniel W.
| title = Matters of Fact: Reading Nonfiction over the Edge
| publisher = Ohio State UP
| location = Columbus
| year = 1997
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = MacFarlane
| first = Scott
| title = The Hippie Narrative: A Literary Perspective on the Counterculture
| publisher = McFarland
| location = Jefferson
| year = 2007
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Mailer
| first = Norman
| title = Advertisements for Myself
| publisher = G. P. Putnam’s Sons
| location = New York
| year = 1959
| ref = harv
}}
* ———. {{cite book
| author =
| title = Existential Aesthetics: An Interview with Norman Mailer
| others = Interview by Laura Adams
| editor-last = Lennon
| editor-first = J. Michael
| book-title = Conversations with Norman Mailer
| publisher = UP of Mississippi
| location = Jackson
| year = 1988
| pages = 207–227
| quote = Rpt. of "Existential Aesthetics: An Interview with Norman Mailer." ''Partisan Review'' 42.2 (1975): 197–214.
| ref = harv
}}
* ———. {{cite book
| author =
| chapter = Prisoner of Success: An Interview with Paul Attanasio
| editor-last = Lennon
| editor-first = J. Michael
| title = Pieces and Pontifications
| publisher = Little, Brown & Company
| location = Boston
| year = 1982
| pages = 129–136
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Manso
| first = Peter
| title = Norman Mailer: His Life and Times
| publisher = Simon and Schuster
| location = New York
| year = 1985
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Miller
| first = Joshua
| title = No Success Like Failure: Existential Politics in Norman Mailer’s ''The Armies of the Night''
| journal = Polity
| volume = 22
| issue = 3
| year = 1990
| pages = 379–396
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Radford
| first = Jean
| chapter = Norman Mailer: The True Story of an American Writer
| editor-last = Gray
| editor-first = Richard
| title = American Fiction: New Readings
| publisher = Vision Press
| location = London
| year = 1983
| pages = 222–237
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Reston
| first = James
| title = Everyone is a Loser
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 23 October 1967
| page = 1
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Roberts
| first = Gene
| title = Wallace Derides War Protesters
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 29 October 1967
| page = 45
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Schueller
| first = Malini Johar
| title = The Politics of Voice: Liberalism and Social Criticism from Franklin to Kingston
| publisher = State University of New York Press
| location = Albany
| year = 1992
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Scott
| first = Nathan A.
| title = Three American Moralists: Mailer, Bellow, Trilling
| publisher = U of Notre Dame P
| location = Notre Dame
| year = 1973
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Small
| first = Melvin
| title = Covering Dissent: The Media and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement
| publisher = Rutgers UP
| location = New Brunswick
| year = 1994
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Streitmatter
| first = Rodger
| title = Mightier Than the Sword: How the News Media Have Shaped American History
| publisher = Westview
| location = Boulder
| year = 1997
| ref = harv
}}
* ———. {{cite book
| author =
| title = Voices of Revolution: The Dissident Press in America
| publisher = Columbia UP
| location = New York
| year = 2001
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Trachtenberg
| first = Alan
| title = Mailer on the Steps of the Pentagon
| magazine = The Nation
| date = 27 May 1968
| pages = 701–702
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Wells
| first = Tom
| title = The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam
| publisher = U of California P
| location = Berkeley
| year = 1994
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Whalen-Bridge
| first = John
| chapter = Norman Mailer
| editor-first = James R.
| editor-last = Giles
| editor2-first = Wanda H.
| editor2-last = Giles
| title = American Novelists Since World War II. Seventh Series
| series = Dictionary of Literary Biography
| volume = 278
| publisher = Gale Group
| location = New York
| year = 2003
| pages = 217–232
| quote = Vol. 278 of ''Dictionary of Literary Biography''. 357 vols. to date. 1978–.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Wyatt
| first = David
| title = Living Out the Sixties
| journal = The Hopkins Review
| volume = 1
| issue = 2
| year = 2008
| pages = 315–332
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last1 = Zaroulis
| first1 = Nancy
| last2 = Sullivan
| first2 = Gerald
| title = Who Spoke Up? American Protest Against the War in Vietnam 1963–1975
| publisher = Doubleday
| location = Garden City
| year = 1984
| ref = harv
}}
{{Refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:“A Noble Pursuit”: The Armies of the Night as Outside Agitator: }}
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Chelsey.brantley: Added paragraphs and page numbers

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{{Byline|last=Westaway|first=Katharine|url=https://prmlr.us/mr07dick|abstract=Mailer has been . . . uniform edition.|note=This paper served . . . me to participate.}}

{{dc|dc=O|n a in weekend in October of 1967,}} tens of thousands of demonstrators
amassed in Washington DC to protest the war in Vietnam. Intending ''The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History'' (1968) to record and commemorate this eventful weekend, Norman Mailer enlarged the march on the Pentagon’s meaning, working as a novelist to make it more
than a four-day set of tremors in the nation’s capital. Some consider the
march a watershed moment, “the first in a chain of events that led to Lyndon
Johnson’s decision . . . to deescalate in Vietnam."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=70}} Mailer’s
nonfiction novel carefully examines this defining event of American history.
Through Mailer’s dual role as a demonstrator and narrator, readers are provided
a rich witness to the many obstacles that were set before marchers in the form of a biased media and government officials opposed to the peace
movement, including the military and police whose physical abuse is featured in the novel.

''Armies'' is also concerned with a sweeping view of American culture ''vis-à-vis'' the march, for this is a “literary project . . . radically committed to a
rendering of the American reality”,{{sfn|Scott|1973|p=18}} and ''Armies'' becomes Mailer’s
attempt to expand upon the march’s implications for the national character.
When ''Armies'' was published, the country was divided over the war in Vietnam; according to a 1967 Gallup poll, when asked whether “the U.S. made a mistake sending troops to Vietnam” forty-six percent said yes while almost an equal amount, forty-four percent, answered no.{{sfn|Gallup|1972|p=2087}} Mailer addresses
the division over the war and also the disparaging of anti-war {{pg|483|484}}
protestors in the mainstream press which created a gulf between mainstream America and the anti-war movement: “from late 1967 into 1968 when Mailer wrote this book, open season on the ‘hippie’ had been tacitly declared."{{sfn|MacFarlane|2007|p=131}} Mailer works to familiarize the populace with these voices of
dissent and to humanize them. The cultural clashes Mailer depicts epitomize the volatility of the U.S. at that moment, the rips in the social fabric that were becoming obvious during the escalation of the Vietnam War.

I will also consider how this novel might have acted as a catalyst for activism
for some contemporary readers and how it worked to coalesce support for the anti-war movement, addressing those Americans who were either unsympathetic towards or even appalled by the anti-war protesters
and challenging readers to see the efficacy and patriotism of the marchers’ cause. It is difficult to gauge the novel’s effectiveness on this front, but I will
consider media coverage and popular reaction to the marchers and to the
book itself. It is in the novelistic form that Mailer shares this moment in history,
and he has said that the reading of novels “is a noble pursuit, that ideally
it profoundly changes the ways in which people perceive their
experience."{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=133}} Mailer understood the great possibility of his
novel to effect change and the opportunity he had to shape readers’ understanding
of what it meant to protest the war in Vietnam.

The political divide was so great in America in the late 1960s that Mailer may have felt obliged to explain one faction to another, to use as a didactic
tool; he was teaching about a counterculture, from which many Americans
were insulated. Scott MacFarlane measures the social turmoil of the times “at a level unseen since the Civil War. The book reading public was clamoring for insight into what was happening on the streets of America."{{sfn|MacFarlane|2007|p=133}} ''Armies'' was a new window into the anti-war movement. The mainstream
media kept Americans in the dark about the anti-war movement. Readers
were witness to Mailer’s own perspective of the counterculture which was not always exhortative: “It was the children in whom Mailer had some hope, a gloomy hope. These mad middle-class children with their lobotomies from
sin, their nihilistic embezzlement of all middle-class moral funds, their innocence,
their lust for apocalypse, their unbelievable indifference to waste."{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=44}} Mailer does not form saints out of the anti-war camp, and
one could not accuse Mailer of being an outright defender of the counterculture.
But through his intimate sketches of the activists and his own experience
as a fellow marcher, we do see images of greatness, of self-sacrifice and {{pg|484|485}}
patriotism. Most important, Mailer, as narrator/protagonist, gives Americans
outside the march a sense of what it was to be a demonstrator.

One of Mailer’s main tasks as an author is to acquaint his readers with the
character of the marchers themselves, so a primary concern of ''Armies'' is media bias as it affected the American public’s sentiments about the acts of resistance happening all around them. But the mainstream press was hawkish:
before the Tet Offensive in January of 1968, “not a single major newspaper
or television network call[ed] for the end to the war."{{sfn|Streitmatter|2001|p=197}} In fact, the mainstream media plainly opposed the anti-war effort “in the heady days early in the war when American correspondents doubled as government handmaidens, they openly condemned anti-war protesters as traitors."{{sfn|Streitmatter|1997|p=201}} This was the atmosphere in which
Mailer attempted to tell a moving tale of the anti-war movement.

Mailer renounces conventional journalism; he doesn’t trust the media to analyze the anti-war movement fairly. Media studies of the time show that
“throughout [the] various stages of escalating involvement, mainstream
American journalists supported the effort, serving as exuberant cheerleaders
for the military."{{sfn|Streitmatter|2001|p=184}} Mailer frequently points out
the unfair coverage that the press gave to the actions of the demonstrators
and how "[e]mphasis was put on every rock thrown, and a count was made of the windows broken. (There were, however, only a few.) But there was no
specific mention of The Wedge [a brutal crowd control technique, which resulted
in beating of the marchers]. Indeed, stories [of police brutality]
quickly disappeared."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=313-14}} This becomes evident as Mailer distinguishes
the reporting of mainstream press from that of the alternative
press. The alternative press (such as the ''Catholic Worker'', ''I.F. Stone’s Weekly,
''National Guardian'', and ''Ramparts'') was critical of the war going back in some
cases to the 1950s when troops were first deployed to Vietnam.{{sfn|Streitmatter|2001|p=184}}

One of the most damning charges in the book is the brutality perpetrated
against the marchers, who were for the most part peacefully protesting; some
protestors were “clubbed until they were broken and bloody."{{sfn|Zaroulis and Sullivan|1984|p=138}} The abuse was amplified by the fact that it often went unreported.
For the reports of police violence, Mailer relies upon outside sources
because he had been arrested early in the demonstration before most of the
violence occurred. Yet he gains credibility when integrating outside witnesses
and reportage into a book that was mostly reported from his standpoint,{{pg|485|486}}
and these external sources may have lent more authority to the charge that
protesters were abused. For any journalist there was difficulty in covering
something as large as the march on the Pentagon “because of the extensive
terrain in question and the rapid movements of the protestors and soldiers."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=72}} Acting as a novelist-journalist, Mailer collects varied media accounts
of the march and weaves them into the narrative; here he features
one Leftist perspective of the march, identifying the witness as “Harvey
Mayes of the English Department at Hunter”:
<blockquote>One soldier spilled the water from his canteen on the ground in order to add to the discomfort of the female demonstrator at his feet. She cursed him—understandably, I think—and shifted her body. She lost her balance and her shoulder hit the rifle at the soldier’s side. He raised the rifle, and with its butt, came down hard on the girl’s leg. The girl tried to move back but was not fast enough to avoid the billy-club of a soldier in the second row of the troops. At least four times that soldier hit her with all his force.{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=303}}</blockquote>
Mailer was obliged to portray the graphic scenes from the march which were missing in many media reports. Perhaps the stories of abuse were reported on more by the Left media because the Left journalists were among the protestors, down in the tussle, while mainstream reporters observed from a safe
distance, avoiding a potential encounter with violent police.

Mailer also gave accounts of “the [mainstream] press [who were], in the
aftermath, antagonistic to the March” and so included passages of an article from the ''New York Times'' which stated that “[i]t is difficult to report publicly the ugly and vulgar provocation of many of the militants. They spat on some
of the soldiers in the front line at the Pentagon and goaded them with the most vicious personal slander. . . . [M]any officials here are surprised that
there was not much more violence."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=313}} Notice that the ''Times'' does not mention any specific violence of the MPs. Numerous commentators condemned ''not'' the beatings meted out to the demonstrators, but the protest
itself; David Brinkley called it a “coarse, vulgar episode."{{sfn|Wells|1994|p=202-3}} However,
Maurice Isserman, one marcher, remembers the marchers for the most part as peaceful, remaining “pretty true to Gandhian principles."{{sfn|Isserman|2007|p=B15}}

In looking beyond Mailer’s collection of media accounts of the march, it{{pg|486|487}}

is clear that he wasn’t exaggerating the bias against anti-war activists. The
''New York Times'' reported that Robert McNamara felt his soldiers showed “restraint . . . under provocation,"{{sfn|Reston|1967|p=1}} and in one article the protesters
were referred to as “scum of the universe”{{sfn|Roberts|1967|p=45}}; another report called the demonstration “mass paranoia . . . elicit[ing] a great deal of foolishness."{{sfn|Baker|1967|p=45}} What the press wrote about the protestors was not always so disparaging, but rarely was the message of the marchers given much time, and this sort of mainstream coverage was the only information readily
available to the general public about the anti-war movement. Some of the first reports of the march on and the siege of the Pentagon were missing reports of police violence because the reporters went home late Saturday
night before the police began employing more militant tactics. But on Monday in another story of the march the ''New York Times'' still ignored “the bloody military sweep of early Sunday morning;” the ''Washington Post''’s Monday coverage was similar in that it “continued to emphasize the violence
of the protestors, not the defenders of the Pentagon."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=76, 78}} ''Time'' came out with its story a few days after the march on October 27 in which they marginalized the protestors as “left-wing radicals, hippies, acid
heads, and people with painted faces in bizarre costumes” while at the same time “applaud[ing] the government for its restraint."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=79-80}}

Mailer is unwilling to let the picture that the mainstream press drew of demonstrators become the only permanent record, and“he scolded the press for their lies, and their misrepresentation, for their guilt in creating a psychology over the last twenty years in the average American which made wars like Vietnam possible."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=93}} Mailer understands that the press is pivotal in a nation’s critique of its culture and policies, and he takes the press to task for their failure to cultivate an informed public. Eventually, Mailer’s ''Armies'' would stand with media accounts as a record of the event. Before ''Armies'' was published as a book in 1968, it appeared in periodicals (almost the entire issues of ''Harper’s'' and ''Commentary'' were given to this story). So
Mailer responded to the mass media’s “forest of inaccuracy” first in popular periodicals and then in book form. According to Dick Fontaine, a British filmmaker who was filming a documentary of Mailer over the weekend of
the march, “Norman remembered, with frightening accuracy, minutes and minutes, pages and pages, of the dialogues he was having with the others, let alone, of course, the brilliant descriptions of time, place and mood. . . . His
memory and interpretations of . . . [these events] are truly breathtaking.”{{pg|487|488}}

This speaks well of Mailer’s journalistic sensibilities and his hope to avoid a
forest of inaccuracies himself. To this end, it is important to recall that ''Armies''
won a Polk Award for excellence in journalism.

One of the achievements of ''Armies'' is that in it Mailer is able to designate the marchers as patriots, a far cry from the criticism that labeled them “draft
dodgers,” “communists,” and “rabble rousers.” In contrast, Mailer describes draft resisters as moral and courageous: “by handing in draft cards, these
young men were committing their future either to prison, emigration, frustration,
or at best, years where everything must be unknown, and that spoke
of a readiness to take moral leaps . . . [and a] faith in one’s ability to react with
grace."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=88}} Mailer recasts draft dodgers as draft resisters, those willing to risk their lives for peace rather than war. Furthermore, Mailer aligns the march itself with America’s long tradition of ostensibly just and triumphant empire-building conflict. He describes the March on the Pentagon as a rite of passage and connects this to a collection of American moments that could be understood as similar rites of passage, for “each generation
of Americans had forged their own rite, in the forest of the Alleghenies and the Adirondacks, at Valley Forge, at New Orleans in 1812, with Rogers and Clark or at Sutter’s Mill, at Gettysburg, the Alamo, the Klondike, the Argonne, Normandy, Pusan."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=308}} Such a comparison implies that without undergoing such crises the U.S. would not have become a sovereign republic, and so the March on the Pentagon is figured as another historic challenge for the country. This lofty rhetoric is meant to stir a reader’s patriotic sympathies, and Mailer is determined that his audience will see the marchers not as subversives but as patriots within the traditions of American democracy.

Mailer understood that “to affect consciousness is thus to shape power” and that his words were shaping people’s perception of the anti-war movement.
Even if his readers were persuaded to believe in a peaceful resolution to the Vietnam War, what would these readers do with this new consciousness,
a consciousness which was “itself a central ingredient in power”{{sfn|Miller|year|p=394}}? It is difficult to measure how readers enact their power, but we can watch how Mailer enacts his own. He undertakes his own civil disobedience, getting arrested in hopes of gaining publicity and offering credence to the
cause of the march, and he understands that his symbolic action must be captured by the press to multiply its effect. When writing the story of ''Armies'',
Mailer tracks his own movement from critic to supporter to war protester to{{pg|488|489}}

prisoner of conscience, and we see that he “feels the claims of imagination
as urgently as the claims of action,"{{sfn|Behar|1970|p=262}} and so he must both examine and act.

''Armies'' represents, for Mailer, a test of his moral strength, an examination of whether Mailer could stand behind his highest moral principles. The story of ''Armies'' offers a way for Mailer to put his philosophy into action and to answer the question, Are you willing to put your life on the line? David Wyatt calls Mailer “a man so obsessed by courage,” which is a persistent theme in Mailer’s famous essay “The White Negro” (1957).{{sfn|Wyatt|2008|p=318}} In many ways ''Armies'' is tied to all of Mailer’s preceding writing. The most obvious connection is to ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' (1967), but the themes and challenges of ''Armies'' are also indebted to ''Cannibals and Christians'' (1966) and ''The Presidential Papers'' (1963). These books variously tested the warrior in Mailer. Even his first book, ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948), plays a role in the conception of ''Armies''. Mary Dearborn claims that ''Armies'' is a recapitulation of his first novel bringing up questions of “confrontation with and the reaction to authority."{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=244}} In ''Armies'', Mailer’s critique of structures of power and his own civil disobedience stands in clear defiance of authoritarian establishments, the same authoritarian establishments which thwarted characters in his previous texts. Mailer’s working out of his own demons in this
journey from author to activist was also meant to engage the hearts and minds of his readers in the important business of opening their eyes to the truth about the war in Vietnam. But it is not just a story about Mailer or the many Mailer characters; Mailer serves as an entry to the predicament of the war in Vietnam and a people’s various ways to protest it.

Mailer admits early in the story his growing belief that his own writing about the Vietnam War is not enough, that “no project had seemed to cost
him enough,” for his writing was one thing, but action was another. And by simply writing about the Vietnam War “he had been suffering more and more in the past few years from the private conviction that he was getting a
little soft, a hint curdled."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=70-1}} This may have served as a barb at
his audience of readers, among whom surely numbered many armchair revolutionaries.
To keep from getting soft and to resist being contented with a
writer’s perspective, he had to move into action himself. He had to actually
take part in the demonstrations, to be physically, not just ideologically in
opposition to the war, but we are not meant to concentrate solely on Mailer’s own struggle. Rather, from his own story of activism he may bring about in {{pg|489|490}}

his readers a new understanding that through the act of reading one becomes
aware, but not yet ''involved'' in a cause. Readers might appreciate that having their consciousness raised was not the same as protesting the war in
their own communities, not at all the same as stepping out into the streets
to form a human protest. One had to move from words to action, from page
to protest.

Mailer asks serious questions of his readers, as Alfred Kazin points out,
describing him as the first “leading American peacenik and resister addressing urgent questions to his ‘army’—Are we good enough? How can we overcome
the ‘mediocrity of the middle-class middle-aged masses of the Left?’
The general shoddiness of American standards just now? The tendency of authorities to lie?”{{sfn|Kazin|1968|p=BR 1}} Mailer artfully places such questions within the
framework of a narrative, addressed not only to fellow peaceniks but also to
a popular readership. It was important that this novel travel beyond the Left community, and it did. Indeed, ''Armies'' “reestablished Mailer with a wide audience"{{sfn|Whalen-Bridge|2003|p=217}} and won both the Pulitzer Prize for General
Nonfiction and the National Book Award. And it was gaining a popular audience
(a readership made up of more than those on the Left) for this topic
that was a challenge for Mailer: “walking the parapet between the intellectual
and the popular, and Mailer with his dream of making ‘a revolution in
the consciousness of our time’ is too ambitious to settle for a minority ‘art’
audience."{{sfn|Radford|1983|p=230}} Mailer was ambitious enough to take on the challenge
of telling a story that those within the anti-war movement would rally
around and those outside would give a fair hearing.

The novel, first in serial and then in book form, was meant to prod readers to action. In fact, it is specifically the expansiveness of the novel genre that Mailer finds useful toward a moral end. Mailer understood the great
potential of the genre. In one interview he contends that “art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people. In particular,
I think the novel is at its best the most moral of the art forms because
it’s the most immediate, the most overbearing . . . It is the most
inescapable."{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=384}} Did Mailer’s readers find his story
inescapable, and if so, were they catalyzed to protest the war themselves? The
answer cannot easily be quantified. We can, however, study the way in which Norman Mailer tried to activate readers. Critics picked up on this hunger
of Mailer’s to make change, his “extra-literary hunger for things to change
and change now, in palpable ways rather than in the imaginary, alternative{{pg|490|491}}

ways in which most artist-novelists deal."{{sfn|Gilman|1968|p=27}} This book is not only
a testimony of civil disobedience but also a story which aims to engender civil disobedience in the reader.

Wherever readers stood on the political continuum, ''Armies'' invites readers
to justify events in the book with their real lives; it allows for “[r]eading
history over the edge of text,” which is a combination of “close reading and
analysis that allow us to get ‘inside’ the narrative, while at the same time we
understand that the narrators and subjects of nonfiction . . . live ‘outside’ the
narrative as well."{{sfn|Lehman|1997|p=3}} This makes for an intense reading experience,
especially if the novelist like Mailer uses his skills to capture an already fascinating
or contentious event. One other factor that might have turned contemporary
readers into implicated readers was the timeliness of the book’s
release: the march was more than mere history it was a recent event when the book was published just seven months after the event—and the controversy
over Vietnam still raged on.

In a nonfiction novel such as ''Armies''the story can take on very real manifestations,
which could lead to political action on the part of readers. A
reader could take measure of his or her own (in)action regarding the war
and choose to act out against the war. Such action is difficult to trace, but in
the case of ''Armies'', Rubin claims the novel “became the Bible of the movement”{{sfn|Manso|1985|p=461}}; Dearborn suggests that “young leftists found it an astute
analysis and were impressed by the passion Mailer brought to the work."{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=246}} However, Michael Albert and Noam Chomsky, both major figures in
the anti-war movement, didn’t feel that it made much of an impact within
the movement. Albert recalls “honestly, I doubt if anyone I knew or virtually
anyone in the movement read it, even I didn’t. My guess would be it had [a]
very very modest impact . . . and virtually none inside the movement per
se.” While it is unclear whether it affected those within the movement, it is also difficult to tell how it affected readers just becoming acquainted with the
peace movement. Dearborn indicates that those outside the movement were
touched by the novel: “across the political spectrum, readers who watched
the student movement with varying degrees of approval or censure were
made to understand that what was going on in the streets . . . was a real phenomenon
that had to be taken extremely seriously."{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=246}} Furthermore, the
Pulitzer and National Book Award, which were because of the novel, are a
sort of establishment seals of approval—proof that it had reached middle
America. Contemporary reviewers were generous with their praise. The
{{pg|491|492}}

===Citations===
{{reflist|20em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin}}
* {{citation
| last = Albert
| first = Michael
| title = A Referral from Noam Chomsky
| date = 10 November 2009
| publisher = Message to Katharine Westaway. E-mail.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Baker
| first = Russell
| title = Observer: Dove Antics
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 24 October 1967
| page = 45
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Behar
| first = Jack
| title = History and Fiction
| journal = NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction
| volume = 3
| issue = 3
| year = 1970
| pages = 260–265
| ref = harv
}}
*{{cite magazine
| last = Bergonzi
| first = Bernard
| title = Selected Books
| magazine = London Magazine
| date = November 1968
| pages = 98–100
| quote = Rev. of ''Cannibals and Christians'' and ''Armies of the Night,'' by Norman Mailer.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Dearborn
| first = Mary V.
| title = Mailer: A Biography
| publisher = Houghton Mifflin
| location = Boston
| year = 1999
| ref = harv
}}
* {{citation
| last = Fontaine
| first = Dick
| title = Question for Dick Fontaine
| date = 1 April 2009
| publisher = Message to Katharine Westaway. E-mail.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| editor-last = Gallup
| editor-first = George Horace
| title = Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1935–1971
| volume = 3
| publisher = Random House
| location = New York
| year = 1972
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Gilman
| first = Richard
| title = What Mailer Has Done
| magazine = The New Republic
| date = 8 June 1968
| pages = 27–31
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Isserman
| first = Maurice
| title = The Flower and the Gun
| magazine = The Chronicle of Higher Education
| date = 19 October 2007
| pages = B14–B15
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Kazin
| first = Alfred
| title = The Trouble He’s Seen
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 5 May 1968
| page = BR1
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Lehman
| first = Daniel W.
| title = Matters of Fact: Reading Nonfiction over the Edge
| publisher = Ohio State UP
| location = Columbus
| year = 1997
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = MacFarlane
| first = Scott
| title = The Hippie Narrative: A Literary Perspective on the Counterculture
| publisher = McFarland
| location = Jefferson
| year = 2007
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Mailer
| first = Norman
| title = Advertisements for Myself
| publisher = G. P. Putnam’s Sons
| location = New York
| year = 1959
| ref = harv
}}
* ———. {{cite book
| author =
| title = Existential Aesthetics: An Interview with Norman Mailer
| others = Interview by Laura Adams
| editor-last = Lennon
| editor-first = J. Michael
| book-title = Conversations with Norman Mailer
| publisher = UP of Mississippi
| location = Jackson
| year = 1988
| pages = 207–227
| quote = Rpt. of "Existential Aesthetics: An Interview with Norman Mailer." ''Partisan Review'' 42.2 (1975): 197–214.
| ref = harv
}}
* ———. {{cite book
| author =
| chapter = Prisoner of Success: An Interview with Paul Attanasio
| editor-last = Lennon
| editor-first = J. Michael
| title = Pieces and Pontifications
| publisher = Little, Brown & Company
| location = Boston
| year = 1982
| pages = 129–136
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Manso
| first = Peter
| title = Norman Mailer: His Life and Times
| publisher = Simon and Schuster
| location = New York
| year = 1985
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Miller
| first = Joshua
| title = No Success Like Failure: Existential Politics in Norman Mailer’s ''The Armies of the Night''
| journal = Polity
| volume = 22
| issue = 3
| year = 1990
| pages = 379–396
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Radford
| first = Jean
| chapter = Norman Mailer: The True Story of an American Writer
| editor-last = Gray
| editor-first = Richard
| title = American Fiction: New Readings
| publisher = Vision Press
| location = London
| year = 1983
| pages = 222–237
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Reston
| first = James
| title = Everyone is a Loser
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 23 October 1967
| page = 1
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Roberts
| first = Gene
| title = Wallace Derides War Protesters
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 29 October 1967
| page = 45
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Schueller
| first = Malini Johar
| title = The Politics of Voice: Liberalism and Social Criticism from Franklin to Kingston
| publisher = State University of New York Press
| location = Albany
| year = 1992
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Scott
| first = Nathan A.
| title = Three American Moralists: Mailer, Bellow, Trilling
| publisher = U of Notre Dame P
| location = Notre Dame
| year = 1973
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Small
| first = Melvin
| title = Covering Dissent: The Media and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement
| publisher = Rutgers UP
| location = New Brunswick
| year = 1994
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Streitmatter
| first = Rodger
| title = Mightier Than the Sword: How the News Media Have Shaped American History
| publisher = Westview
| location = Boulder
| year = 1997
| ref = harv
}}
* ———. {{cite book
| author =
| title = Voices of Revolution: The Dissident Press in America
| publisher = Columbia UP
| location = New York
| year = 2001
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Trachtenberg
| first = Alan
| title = Mailer on the Steps of the Pentagon
| magazine = The Nation
| date = 27 May 1968
| pages = 701–702
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Wells
| first = Tom
| title = The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam
| publisher = U of California P
| location = Berkeley
| year = 1994
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Whalen-Bridge
| first = John
| chapter = Norman Mailer
| editor-first = James R.
| editor-last = Giles
| editor2-first = Wanda H.
| editor2-last = Giles
| title = American Novelists Since World War II. Seventh Series
| series = Dictionary of Literary Biography
| volume = 278
| publisher = Gale Group
| location = New York
| year = 2003
| pages = 217–232
| quote = Vol. 278 of ''Dictionary of Literary Biography''. 357 vols. to date. 1978–.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Wyatt
| first = David
| title = Living Out the Sixties
| journal = The Hopkins Review
| volume = 1
| issue = 2
| year = 2008
| pages = 315–332
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last1 = Zaroulis
| first1 = Nancy
| last2 = Sullivan
| first2 = Gerald
| title = Who Spoke Up? American Protest Against the War in Vietnam 1963–1975
| publisher = Doubleday
| location = Garden City
| year = 1984
| ref = harv
}}
{{Refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:“A Noble Pursuit”: The Armies of the Night as Outside Agitator: }}
[[Category:Miscellany (MR)]]

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2025-04-19T15:03:33Z

Chelsey.brantley: Added paragraphs and page numbers

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{{Byline|last=Westaway|first=Katharine|url=https://prmlr.us/mr07dick|abstract=Mailer has been . . . uniform edition.|note=This paper served . . . me to participate.}}

{{dc|dc=O|n a in weekend in October of 1967,}} tens of thousands of demonstrators
amassed in Washington DC to protest the war in Vietnam. Intending ''The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History'' (1968) to record and commemorate this eventful weekend, Norman Mailer enlarged the march on the Pentagon’s meaning, working as a novelist to make it more
than a four-day set of tremors in the nation’s capital. Some consider the
march a watershed moment, “the first in a chain of events that led to Lyndon
Johnson’s decision . . . to deescalate in Vietnam."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=70}} Mailer’s
nonfiction novel carefully examines this defining event of American history.
Through Mailer’s dual role as a demonstrator and narrator, readers are provided
a rich witness to the many obstacles that were set before marchers in the form of a biased media and government officials opposed to the peace
movement, including the military and police whose physical abuse is featured in the novel.

''Armies'' is also concerned with a sweeping view of American culture ''vis-à-vis'' the march, for this is a “literary project . . . radically committed to a
rendering of the American reality”,{{sfn|Scott|1973|p=18}} and ''Armies'' becomes Mailer’s
attempt to expand upon the march’s implications for the national character.
When ''Armies'' was published, the country was divided over the war in Vietnam; according to a 1967 Gallup poll, when asked whether “the U.S. made a mistake sending troops to Vietnam” forty-six percent said yes while almost an equal amount, forty-four percent, answered no.{{sfn|Gallup|1972|p=2087}} Mailer addresses
the division over the war and also the disparaging of anti-war {{pg|483|484}}
protestors in the mainstream press which created a gulf between mainstream America and the anti-war movement: “from late 1967 into 1968 when Mailer wrote this book, open season on the ‘hippie’ had been tacitly declared."{{sfn|MacFarlane|2007|p=131}} Mailer works to familiarize the populace with these voices of
dissent and to humanize them. The cultural clashes Mailer depicts epitomize the volatility of the U.S. at that moment, the rips in the social fabric that were becoming obvious during the escalation of the Vietnam War.

I will also consider how this novel might have acted as a catalyst for activism
for some contemporary readers and how it worked to coalesce support for the anti-war movement, addressing those Americans who were either unsympathetic towards or even appalled by the anti-war protesters
and challenging readers to see the efficacy and patriotism of the marchers’ cause. It is difficult to gauge the novel’s effectiveness on this front, but I will
consider media coverage and popular reaction to the marchers and to the
book itself. It is in the novelistic form that Mailer shares this moment in history,
and he has said that the reading of novels “is a noble pursuit, that ideally
it profoundly changes the ways in which people perceive their
experience."{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=133}} Mailer understood the great possibility of his
novel to effect change and the opportunity he had to shape readers’ understanding
of what it meant to protest the war in Vietnam.

The political divide was so great in America in the late 1960s that Mailer may have felt obliged to explain one faction to another, to use as a didactic
tool; he was teaching about a counterculture, from which many Americans
were insulated. Scott MacFarlane measures the social turmoil of the times “at a level unseen since the Civil War. The book reading public was clamoring for insight into what was happening on the streets of America."{{sfn|MacFarlane|2007|p=133}} ''Armies'' was a new window into the anti-war movement. The mainstream
media kept Americans in the dark about the anti-war movement. Readers
were witness to Mailer’s own perspective of the counterculture which was not always exhortative: “It was the children in whom Mailer had some hope, a gloomy hope. These mad middle-class children with their lobotomies from
sin, their nihilistic embezzlement of all middle-class moral funds, their innocence,
their lust for apocalypse, their unbelievable indifference to waste."{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=44}} Mailer does not form saints out of the anti-war camp, and
one could not accuse Mailer of being an outright defender of the counterculture.
But through his intimate sketches of the activists and his own experience
as a fellow marcher, we do see images of greatness, of self-sacrifice and {{pg|484|485}}
patriotism. Most important, Mailer, as narrator/protagonist, gives Americans
outside the march a sense of what it was to be a demonstrator.

One of Mailer’s main tasks as an author is to acquaint his readers with the
character of the marchers themselves, so a primary concern of ''Armies'' is media bias as it affected the American public’s sentiments about the acts of resistance happening all around them. But the mainstream press was hawkish:
before the Tet Offensive in January of 1968, “not a single major newspaper
or television network call[ed] for the end to the war."{{sfn|Streitmatter|2001|p=197}} In fact, the mainstream media plainly opposed the anti-war effort “in the heady days early in the war when American correspondents doubled as government handmaidens, they openly condemned anti-war protesters as traitors."{{sfn|Streitmatter|1997|p=201}} This was the atmosphere in which
Mailer attempted to tell a moving tale of the anti-war movement.

Mailer renounces conventional journalism; he doesn’t trust the media to analyze the anti-war movement fairly. Media studies of the time show that
“throughout [the] various stages of escalating involvement, mainstream
American journalists supported the effort, serving as exuberant cheerleaders
for the military."{{sfn|Streitmatter|2001|p=184}} Mailer frequently points out
the unfair coverage that the press gave to the actions of the demonstrators
and how "[e]mphasis was put on every rock thrown, and a count was made of the windows broken. (There were, however, only a few.) But there was no
specific mention of The Wedge [a brutal crowd control technique, which resulted
in beating of the marchers]. Indeed, stories [of police brutality]
quickly disappeared."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=313-14}} This becomes evident as Mailer distinguishes
the reporting of mainstream press from that of the alternative
press. The alternative press (such as the ''Catholic Worker'', ''I.F. Stone’s Weekly,
''National Guardian'', and ''Ramparts'') was critical of the war going back in some
cases to the 1950s when troops were first deployed to Vietnam.{{sfn|Streitmatter|2001|p=184}}

One of the most damning charges in the book is the brutality perpetrated
against the marchers, who were for the most part peacefully protesting; some
protestors were “clubbed until they were broken and bloody."{{sfn|Zaroulis and Sullivan|1984|p=138}} The abuse was amplified by the fact that it often went unreported.
For the reports of police violence, Mailer relies upon outside sources
because he had been arrested early in the demonstration before most of the
violence occurred. Yet he gains credibility when integrating outside witnesses
and reportage into a book that was mostly reported from his standpoint,{{pg|485|486}}
and these external sources may have lent more authority to the charge that
protesters were abused. For any journalist there was difficulty in covering
something as large as the march on the Pentagon “because of the extensive
terrain in question and the rapid movements of the protestors and soldiers."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=72}} Acting as a novelist-journalist, Mailer collects varied media accounts
of the march and weaves them into the narrative; here he features
one Leftist perspective of the march, identifying the witness as “Harvey
Mayes of the English Department at Hunter”:
<blockquote>One soldier spilled the water from his canteen on the ground in order to add to the discomfort of the female demonstrator at his feet. She cursed him—understandably, I think—and shifted her body. She lost her balance and her shoulder hit the rifle at the soldier’s side. He raised the rifle, and with its butt, came down hard on the girl’s leg. The girl tried to move back but was not fast enough to avoid the billy-club of a soldier in the second row of the troops. At least four times that soldier hit her with all his force.{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=303}}</blockquote>
Mailer was obliged to portray the graphic scenes from the march which were missing in many media reports. Perhaps the stories of abuse were reported on more by the Left media because the Left journalists were among the protestors, down in the tussle, while mainstream reporters observed from a safe
distance, avoiding a potential encounter with violent police.

Mailer also gave accounts of “the [mainstream] press [who were], in the
aftermath, antagonistic to the March” and so included passages of an article from the ''New York Times'' which stated that “[i]t is difficult to report publicly the ugly and vulgar provocation of many of the militants. They spat on some
of the soldiers in the front line at the Pentagon and goaded them with the most vicious personal slander. . . . [M]any officials here are surprised that
there was not much more violence."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=313}} Notice that the ''Times'' does not mention any specific violence of the MPs. Numerous commentators condemned ''not'' the beatings meted out to the demonstrators, but the protest
itself; David Brinkley called it a “coarse, vulgar episode."{{sfn|Wells|1994|p=202-3}} However,
Maurice Isserman, one marcher, remembers the marchers for the most part as peaceful, remaining “pretty true to Gandhian principles."{{sfn|Isserman|2007|p=B15}}

In looking beyond Mailer’s collection of media accounts of the march, it{{pg|486|487}}

is clear that he wasn’t exaggerating the bias against anti-war activists. The
''New York Times'' reported that Robert McNamara felt his soldiers showed “restraint . . . under provocation,"{{sfn|Reston|1967|p=1}} and in one article the protesters
were referred to as “scum of the universe”{{sfn|Roberts|1967|p=45}}; another report called the demonstration “mass paranoia . . . elicit[ing] a great deal of foolishness."{{sfn|Baker|1967|p=45}} What the press wrote about the protestors was not always so disparaging, but rarely was the message of the marchers given much time, and this sort of mainstream coverage was the only information readily
available to the general public about the anti-war movement. Some of the first reports of the march on and the siege of the Pentagon were missing reports of police violence because the reporters went home late Saturday
night before the police began employing more militant tactics. But on Monday in another story of the march the ''New York Times'' still ignored “the bloody military sweep of early Sunday morning;” the ''Washington Post''’s Monday coverage was similar in that it “continued to emphasize the violence
of the protestors, not the defenders of the Pentagon."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=76, 78}} ''Time'' came out with its story a few days after the march on October 27 in which they marginalized the protestors as “left-wing radicals, hippies, acid
heads, and people with painted faces in bizarre costumes” while at the same time “applaud[ing] the government for its restraint."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=79-80}}

Mailer is unwilling to let the picture that the mainstream press drew of demonstrators become the only permanent record, and“he scolded the press for their lies, and their misrepresentation, for their guilt in creating a psychology over the last twenty years in the average American which made wars like Vietnam possible."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=93}} Mailer understands that the press is pivotal in a nation’s critique of its culture and policies, and he takes the press to task for their failure to cultivate an informed public. Eventually, Mailer’s ''Armies'' would stand with media accounts as a record of the event. Before ''Armies'' was published as a book in 1968, it appeared in periodicals (almost the entire issues of ''Harper’s'' and ''Commentary'' were given to this story). So
Mailer responded to the mass media’s “forest of inaccuracy” first in popular periodicals and then in book form. According to Dick Fontaine, a British filmmaker who was filming a documentary of Mailer over the weekend of
the march, “Norman remembered, with frightening accuracy, minutes and minutes, pages and pages, of the dialogues he was having with the others, let alone, of course, the brilliant descriptions of time, place and mood. . . . His
memory and interpretations of . . . [these events] are truly breathtaking.”{{pg|487|488}}

This speaks well of Mailer’s journalistic sensibilities and his hope to avoid a
forest of inaccuracies himself. To this end, it is important to recall that ''Armies''
won a Polk Award for excellence in journalism.

One of the achievements of ''Armies'' is that in it Mailer is able to designate the marchers as patriots, a far cry from the criticism that labeled them “draft
dodgers,” “communists,” and “rabble rousers.” In contrast, Mailer describes draft resisters as moral and courageous: “by handing in draft cards, these
young men were committing their future either to prison, emigration, frustration,
or at best, years where everything must be unknown, and that spoke
of a readiness to take moral leaps . . . [and a] faith in one’s ability to react with
grace."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=88}} Mailer recasts draft dodgers as draft resisters, those willing to risk their lives for peace rather than war. Furthermore, Mailer aligns the march itself with America’s long tradition of ostensibly just and triumphant empire-building conflict. He describes the March on the Pentagon as a rite of passage and connects this to a collection of American moments that could be understood as similar rites of passage, for “each generation
of Americans had forged their own rite, in the forest of the Alleghenies and the Adirondacks, at Valley Forge, at New Orleans in 1812, with Rogers and Clark or at Sutter’s Mill, at Gettysburg, the Alamo, the Klondike, the Argonne, Normandy, Pusan."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=308}} Such a comparison implies that without undergoing such crises the U.S. would not have become a sovereign republic, and so the March on the Pentagon is figured as another historic challenge for the country. This lofty rhetoric is meant to stir a reader’s patriotic sympathies, and Mailer is determined that his audience will see the marchers not as subversives but as patriots within the traditions of American democracy.

Mailer understood that “to affect consciousness is thus to shape power” and that his words were shaping people’s perception of the anti-war movement.
Even if his readers were persuaded to believe in a peaceful resolution to the Vietnam War, what would these readers do with this new consciousness,
a consciousness which was “itself a central ingredient in power”{{sfn|Miller|year|p=394}}? It is difficult to measure how readers enact their power, but we can watch how Mailer enacts his own. He undertakes his own civil disobedience, getting arrested in hopes of gaining publicity and offering credence to the
cause of the march, and he understands that his symbolic action must be captured by the press to multiply its effect. When writing the story of ''Armies'',
Mailer tracks his own movement from critic to supporter to war protester to{{pg|488|489}}

prisoner of conscience, and we see that he “feels the claims of imagination
as urgently as the claims of action,"{{sfn|Behar|1970|p=262}} and so he must both examine and act.

''Armies'' represents, for Mailer, a test of his moral strength, an examination of whether Mailer could stand behind his highest moral principles. The story of ''Armies'' offers a way for Mailer to put his philosophy into action and to answer the question, Are you willing to put your life on the line? David Wyatt calls Mailer “a man so obsessed by courage,” which is a persistent theme in Mailer’s famous essay “The White Negro” (1957).{{sfn|Wyatt|2008|p=318}} In many ways ''Armies'' is tied to all of Mailer’s preceding writing. The most obvious connection is to ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' (1967), but the themes and challenges of ''Armies'' are also indebted to ''Cannibals and Christians'' (1966) and ''The Presidential Papers'' (1963). These books variously tested the warrior in Mailer. Even his first book, ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948), plays a role in the conception of ''Armies''. Mary Dearborn claims that ''Armies'' is a recapitulation of his first novel bringing up questions of “confrontation with and the reaction to authority."{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=244}} In ''Armies'', Mailer’s critique of structures of power and his own civil disobedience stands in clear defiance of authoritarian establishments, the same authoritarian establishments which thwarted characters in his previous texts. Mailer’s working out of his own demons in this
journey from author to activist was also meant to engage the hearts and minds of his readers in the important business of opening their eyes to the truth about the war in Vietnam. But it is not just a story about Mailer or the many Mailer characters; Mailer serves as an entry to the predicament of the war in Vietnam and a people’s various ways to protest it.

Mailer admits early in the story his growing belief that his own writing about the Vietnam War is not enough, that “no project had seemed to cost
him enough,” for his writing was one thing, but action was another. And by simply writing about the Vietnam War “he had been suffering more and more in the past few years from the private conviction that he was getting a
little soft, a hint curdled."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=70-1}} This may have served as a barb at
his audience of readers, among whom surely numbered many armchair revolutionaries.
To keep from getting soft and to resist being contented with a
writer’s perspective, he had to move into action himself. He had to actually
take part in the demonstrations, to be physically, not just ideologically in
opposition to the war, but we are not meant to concentrate solely on Mailer’s own struggle. Rather, from his own story of activism he may bring about in {{pg|489|490}}

his readers a new understanding that through the act of reading one becomes
aware, but not yet ''involved'' in a cause. Readers might appreciate that having their consciousness raised was not the same as protesting the war in
their own communities, not at all the same as stepping out into the streets
to form a human protest. One had to move from words to action, from page
to protest.

Mailer asks serious questions of his readers, as Alfred Kazin points out,
describing him as the first “leading American peacenik and resister addressing urgent questions to his ‘army’—Are we good enough? How can we overcome
the ‘mediocrity of the middle-class middle-aged masses of the Left?’
The general shoddiness of American standards just now? The tendency of authorities to lie?”{{sfn|Kazin|1968|p=BR 1}} Mailer artfully places such questions within the
framework of a narrative, addressed not only to fellow peaceniks but also to
a popular readership. It was important that this novel travel beyond the Left community, and it did. Indeed, ''Armies'' “reestablished Mailer with a wide audience"{{sfn|Whalen-Bridge|2003|p=217}} and won both the Pulitzer Prize for General
Nonfiction and the National Book Award. And it was gaining a popular audience
(a readership made up of more than those on the Left) for this topic
that was a challenge for Mailer: “walking the parapet between the intellectual
and the popular, and Mailer with his dream of making ‘a revolution in
the consciousness of our time’ is too ambitious to settle for a minority ‘art’
audience."{{sfn|Radford|1983|p=230}} Mailer was ambitious enough to take on the challenge
of telling a story that those within the anti-war movement would rally
around and those outside would give a fair hearing.

The novel, first in serial and then in book form, was meant to prod readers to action. In fact, it is specifically the expansiveness of the novel genre that Mailer finds useful toward a moral end. Mailer understood the great
potential of the genre. In one interview he contends that “art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people. In particular,
I think the novel is at its best the most moral of the art forms because
it’s the most immediate, the most overbearing . . . It is the most
inescapable."{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=384}} Did Mailer’s readers find his story
inescapable, and if so, were they catalyzed to protest the war themselves? The
answer cannot easily be quantified. We can, however, study the way in which Norman Mailer tried to activate readers. Critics picked up on this hunger
of Mailer’s to make change, his “extra-literary hunger for things to change
and change now, in palpable ways rather than in the imaginary, alternative{{pg|490|491}}

===Citations===
{{reflist|20em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin}}
* {{citation
| last = Albert
| first = Michael
| title = A Referral from Noam Chomsky
| date = 10 November 2009
| publisher = Message to Katharine Westaway. E-mail.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Baker
| first = Russell
| title = Observer: Dove Antics
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 24 October 1967
| page = 45
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
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| first = Jack
| title = History and Fiction
| journal = NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction
| volume = 3
| issue = 3
| year = 1970
| pages = 260–265
| ref = harv
}}
*{{cite magazine
| last = Bergonzi
| first = Bernard
| title = Selected Books
| magazine = London Magazine
| date = November 1968
| pages = 98–100
| quote = Rev. of ''Cannibals and Christians'' and ''Armies of the Night,'' by Norman Mailer.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Dearborn
| first = Mary V.
| title = Mailer: A Biography
| publisher = Houghton Mifflin
| location = Boston
| year = 1999
| ref = harv
}}
* {{citation
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| first = Dick
| title = Question for Dick Fontaine
| date = 1 April 2009
| publisher = Message to Katharine Westaway. E-mail.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| editor-last = Gallup
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| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
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| first = Richard
| title = What Mailer Has Done
| magazine = The New Republic
| date = 8 June 1968
| pages = 27–31
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Isserman
| first = Maurice
| title = The Flower and the Gun
| magazine = The Chronicle of Higher Education
| date = 19 October 2007
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| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
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| first = Alfred
| title = The Trouble He’s Seen
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 5 May 1968
| page = BR1
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
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| first = Daniel W.
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| first = Scott
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| ref = harv
}}
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| last = Mailer
| first = Norman
| title = Advertisements for Myself
| publisher = G. P. Putnam’s Sons
| location = New York
| year = 1959
| ref = harv
}}
* ———. {{cite book
| author =
| title = Existential Aesthetics: An Interview with Norman Mailer
| others = Interview by Laura Adams
| editor-last = Lennon
| editor-first = J. Michael
| book-title = Conversations with Norman Mailer
| publisher = UP of Mississippi
| location = Jackson
| year = 1988
| pages = 207–227
| quote = Rpt. of "Existential Aesthetics: An Interview with Norman Mailer." ''Partisan Review'' 42.2 (1975): 197–214.
| ref = harv
}}
* ———. {{cite book
| author =
| chapter = Prisoner of Success: An Interview with Paul Attanasio
| editor-last = Lennon
| editor-first = J. Michael
| title = Pieces and Pontifications
| publisher = Little, Brown & Company
| location = Boston
| year = 1982
| pages = 129–136
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Manso
| first = Peter
| title = Norman Mailer: His Life and Times
| publisher = Simon and Schuster
| location = New York
| year = 1985
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Miller
| first = Joshua
| title = No Success Like Failure: Existential Politics in Norman Mailer’s ''The Armies of the Night''
| journal = Polity
| volume = 22
| issue = 3
| year = 1990
| pages = 379–396
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Radford
| first = Jean
| chapter = Norman Mailer: The True Story of an American Writer
| editor-last = Gray
| editor-first = Richard
| title = American Fiction: New Readings
| publisher = Vision Press
| location = London
| year = 1983
| pages = 222–237
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Reston
| first = James
| title = Everyone is a Loser
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 23 October 1967
| page = 1
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Roberts
| first = Gene
| title = Wallace Derides War Protesters
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 29 October 1967
| page = 45
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Schueller
| first = Malini Johar
| title = The Politics of Voice: Liberalism and Social Criticism from Franklin to Kingston
| publisher = State University of New York Press
| location = Albany
| year = 1992
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Scott
| first = Nathan A.
| title = Three American Moralists: Mailer, Bellow, Trilling
| publisher = U of Notre Dame P
| location = Notre Dame
| year = 1973
| ref = harv
}}
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| last = Small
| first = Melvin
| title = Covering Dissent: The Media and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement
| publisher = Rutgers UP
| location = New Brunswick
| year = 1994
| ref = harv
}}
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| first = Rodger
| title = Mightier Than the Sword: How the News Media Have Shaped American History
| publisher = Westview
| location = Boulder
| year = 1997
| ref = harv
}}
* ———. {{cite book
| author =
| title = Voices of Revolution: The Dissident Press in America
| publisher = Columbia UP
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| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Trachtenberg
| first = Alan
| title = Mailer on the Steps of the Pentagon
| magazine = The Nation
| date = 27 May 1968
| pages = 701–702
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Wells
| first = Tom
| title = The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam
| publisher = U of California P
| location = Berkeley
| year = 1994
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Whalen-Bridge
| first = John
| chapter = Norman Mailer
| editor-first = James R.
| editor-last = Giles
| editor2-first = Wanda H.
| editor2-last = Giles
| title = American Novelists Since World War II. Seventh Series
| series = Dictionary of Literary Biography
| volume = 278
| publisher = Gale Group
| location = New York
| year = 2003
| pages = 217–232
| quote = Vol. 278 of ''Dictionary of Literary Biography''. 357 vols. to date. 1978–.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Wyatt
| first = David
| title = Living Out the Sixties
| journal = The Hopkins Review
| volume = 1
| issue = 2
| year = 2008
| pages = 315–332
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last1 = Zaroulis
| first1 = Nancy
| last2 = Sullivan
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| publisher = Doubleday
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| year = 1984
| ref = harv
}}
{{Refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:“A Noble Pursuit”: The Armies of the Night as Outside Agitator: }}
[[Category:Miscellany (MR)]]

User:Chelsey.brantley/sandbox

2025-04-19T14:50:39Z

Chelsey.brantley: Added another paragraph

{{user sandbox|plain=yes}}

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}}

{{Byline|last=Westaway|first=Katharine|url=https://prmlr.us/mr07dick|abstract=Mailer has been . . . uniform edition.|note=This paper served . . . me to participate.}}

{{dc|dc=O|n a in weekend in October of 1967,}} tens of thousands of demonstrators
amassed in Washington DC to protest the war in Vietnam. Intending ''The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History'' (1968) to record and commemorate this eventful weekend, Norman Mailer enlarged the march on the Pentagon’s meaning, working as a novelist to make it more
than a four-day set of tremors in the nation’s capital. Some consider the
march a watershed moment, “the first in a chain of events that led to Lyndon
Johnson’s decision . . . to deescalate in Vietnam."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=70}} Mailer’s
nonfiction novel carefully examines this defining event of American history.
Through Mailer’s dual role as a demonstrator and narrator, readers are provided
a rich witness to the many obstacles that were set before marchers in the form of a biased media and government officials opposed to the peace
movement, including the military and police whose physical abuse is featured in the novel.

''Armies'' is also concerned with a sweeping view of American culture ''vis-à-vis'' the march, for this is a “literary project . . . radically committed to a
rendering of the American reality”,{{sfn|Scott|1973|p=18}} and ''Armies'' becomes Mailer’s
attempt to expand upon the march’s implications for the national character.
When ''Armies'' was published, the country was divided over the war in Vietnam; according to a 1967 Gallup poll, when asked whether “the U.S. made a mistake sending troops to Vietnam” forty-six percent said yes while almost an equal amount, forty-four percent, answered no.{{sfn|Gallup|1972|p=2087}} Mailer addresses
the division over the war and also the disparaging of anti-war {{pg|483|484}}
protestors in the mainstream press which created a gulf between mainstream America and the anti-war movement: “from late 1967 into 1968 when Mailer wrote this book, open season on the ‘hippie’ had been tacitly declared."{{sfn|MacFarlane|2007|p=131}} Mailer works to familiarize the populace with these voices of
dissent and to humanize them. The cultural clashes Mailer depicts epitomize the volatility of the U.S. at that moment, the rips in the social fabric that were becoming obvious during the escalation of the Vietnam War.

I will also consider how this novel might have acted as a catalyst for activism
for some contemporary readers and how it worked to coalesce support for the anti-war movement, addressing those Americans who were either unsympathetic towards or even appalled by the anti-war protesters
and challenging readers to see the efficacy and patriotism of the marchers’ cause. It is difficult to gauge the novel’s effectiveness on this front, but I will
consider media coverage and popular reaction to the marchers and to the
book itself. It is in the novelistic form that Mailer shares this moment in history,
and he has said that the reading of novels “is a noble pursuit, that ideally
it profoundly changes the ways in which people perceive their
experience."{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=133}} Mailer understood the great possibility of his
novel to effect change and the opportunity he had to shape readers’ understanding
of what it meant to protest the war in Vietnam.

The political divide was so great in America in the late 1960s that Mailer may have felt obliged to explain one faction to another, to use as a didactic
tool; he was teaching about a counterculture, from which many Americans
were insulated. Scott MacFarlane measures the social turmoil of the times “at a level unseen since the Civil War. The book reading public was clamoring for insight into what was happening on the streets of America."{{sfn|MacFarlane|2007|p=133}} ''Armies'' was a new window into the anti-war movement. The mainstream
media kept Americans in the dark about the anti-war movement. Readers
were witness to Mailer’s own perspective of the counterculture which was not always exhortative: “It was the children in whom Mailer had some hope, a gloomy hope. These mad middle-class children with their lobotomies from
sin, their nihilistic embezzlement of all middle-class moral funds, their innocence,
their lust for apocalypse, their unbelievable indifference to waste."{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=44}} Mailer does not form saints out of the anti-war camp, and
one could not accuse Mailer of being an outright defender of the counterculture.
But through his intimate sketches of the activists and his own experience
as a fellow marcher, we do see images of greatness, of self-sacrifice and {{pg|484|485}}
patriotism. Most important, Mailer, as narrator/protagonist, gives Americans
outside the march a sense of what it was to be a demonstrator.

One of Mailer’s main tasks as an author is to acquaint his readers with the
character of the marchers themselves, so a primary concern of ''Armies'' is media bias as it affected the American public’s sentiments about the acts of resistance happening all around them. But the mainstream press was hawkish:
before the Tet Offensive in January of 1968, “not a single major newspaper
or television network call[ed] for the end to the war."{{sfn|Streitmatter|2001|p=197}} In fact, the mainstream media plainly opposed the anti-war effort “in the heady days early in the war when American correspondents doubled as government handmaidens, they openly condemned anti-war protesters as traitors."{{sfn|Streitmatter|1997|p=201}} This was the atmosphere in which
Mailer attempted to tell a moving tale of the anti-war movement.

Mailer renounces conventional journalism; he doesn’t trust the media to analyze the anti-war movement fairly. Media studies of the time show that
“throughout [the] various stages of escalating involvement, mainstream
American journalists supported the effort, serving as exuberant cheerleaders
for the military."{{sfn|Streitmatter|2001|p=184}} Mailer frequently points out
the unfair coverage that the press gave to the actions of the demonstrators
and how "[e]mphasis was put on every rock thrown, and a count was made of the windows broken. (There were, however, only a few.) But there was no
specific mention of The Wedge [a brutal crowd control technique, which resulted
in beating of the marchers]. Indeed, stories [of police brutality]
quickly disappeared."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=313-14}} This becomes evident as Mailer distinguishes
the reporting of mainstream press from that of the alternative
press. The alternative press (such as the ''Catholic Worker'', ''I.F. Stone’s Weekly,
''National Guardian'', and ''Ramparts'') was critical of the war going back in some
cases to the 1950s when troops were first deployed to Vietnam.{{sfn|Streitmatter|2001|p=184}}

One of the most damning charges in the book is the brutality perpetrated
against the marchers, who were for the most part peacefully protesting; some
protestors were “clubbed until they were broken and bloody."{{sfn|Zaroulis and Sullivan|1984|p=138}} The abuse was amplified by the fact that it often went unreported.
For the reports of police violence, Mailer relies upon outside sources
because he had been arrested early in the demonstration before most of the
violence occurred. Yet he gains credibility when integrating outside witnesses
and reportage into a book that was mostly reported from his standpoint,{{pg|485|486}}
and these external sources may have lent more authority to the charge that
protesters were abused. For any journalist there was difficulty in covering
something as large as the march on the Pentagon “because of the extensive
terrain in question and the rapid movements of the protestors and soldiers."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=72}} Acting as a novelist-journalist, Mailer collects varied media accounts
of the march and weaves them into the narrative; here he features
one Leftist perspective of the march, identifying the witness as “Harvey
Mayes of the English Department at Hunter”:
<blockquote>One soldier spilled the water from his canteen on the ground in order to add to the discomfort of the female demonstrator at his feet. She cursed him—understandably, I think—and shifted her body. She lost her balance and her shoulder hit the rifle at the soldier’s side. He raised the rifle, and with its butt, came down hard on the girl’s leg. The girl tried to move back but was not fast enough to avoid the billy-club of a soldier in the second row of the troops. At least four times that soldier hit her with all his force.{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=303}}</blockquote>
Mailer was obliged to portray the graphic scenes from the march which were missing in many media reports. Perhaps the stories of abuse were reported on more by the Left media because the Left journalists were among the protestors, down in the tussle, while mainstream reporters observed from a safe
distance, avoiding a potential encounter with violent police.

Mailer also gave accounts of “the [mainstream] press [who were], in the
aftermath, antagonistic to the March” and so included passages of an article from the ''New York Times'' which stated that “[i]t is difficult to report publicly the ugly and vulgar provocation of many of the militants. They spat on some
of the soldiers in the front line at the Pentagon and goaded them with the most vicious personal slander. . . . [M]any officials here are surprised that
there was not much more violence."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=313}} Notice that the ''Times'' does not mention any specific violence of the MPs. Numerous commentators condemned ''not'' the beatings meted out to the demonstrators, but the protest
itself; David Brinkley called it a “coarse, vulgar episode."{{sfn|Wells|1994|p=202-3}} However,
Maurice Isserman, one marcher, remembers the marchers for the most part as peaceful, remaining “pretty true to Gandhian principles."{{sfn|Isserman|2007|p=B15}}

In looking beyond Mailer’s collection of media accounts of the march, it{{pg|486|487}}

is clear that he wasn’t exaggerating the bias against anti-war activists. The
''New York Times'' reported that Robert McNamara felt his soldiers showed “restraint . . . under provocation,"{{sfn|Reston|1967|p=1}} and in one article the protesters
were referred to as “scum of the universe”{{sfn|Roberts|1967|p=45}}; another report called the demonstration “mass paranoia . . . elicit[ing] a great deal of foolishness."{{sfn|Baker|1967|p=45}} What the press wrote about the protestors was not always so disparaging, but rarely was the message of the marchers given much time, and this sort of mainstream coverage was the only information readily
available to the general public about the anti-war movement. Some of the first reports of the march on and the siege of the Pentagon were missing reports of police violence because the reporters went home late Saturday
night before the police began employing more militant tactics. But on Monday in another story of the march the ''New York Times'' still ignored “the bloody military sweep of early Sunday morning;” the ''Washington Post''’s Monday coverage was similar in that it “continued to emphasize the violence
of the protestors, not the defenders of the Pentagon."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=76, 78}} ''Time'' came out with its story a few days after the march on October 27 in which they marginalized the protestors as “left-wing radicals, hippies, acid
heads, and people with painted faces in bizarre costumes” while at the same time “applaud[ing] the government for its restraint."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=79-80}}

Mailer is unwilling to let the picture that the mainstream press drew of demonstrators become the only permanent record, and“he scolded the press for their lies, and their misrepresentation, for their guilt in creating a psychology over the last twenty years in the average American which made wars like Vietnam possible."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=93}} Mailer understands that the press is pivotal in a nation’s critique of its culture and policies, and he takes the press to task for their failure to cultivate an informed public. Eventually, Mailer’s ''Armies'' would stand with media accounts as a record of the event. Before ''Armies'' was published as a book in 1968, it appeared in periodicals (almost the entire issues of ''Harper’s'' and ''Commentary'' were given to this story). So
Mailer responded to the mass media’s “forest of inaccuracy” first in popular periodicals and then in book form. According to Dick Fontaine, a British filmmaker who was filming a documentary of Mailer over the weekend of
the march, “Norman remembered, with frightening accuracy, minutes and minutes, pages and pages, of the dialogues he was having with the others, let alone, of course, the brilliant descriptions of time, place and mood. . . . His
memory and interpretations of . . . [these events] are truly breathtaking.”{{pg|487|488}}

This speaks well of Mailer’s journalistic sensibilities and his hope to avoid a
forest of inaccuracies himself. To this end, it is important to recall that ''Armies''
won a Polk Award for excellence in journalism.

One of the achievements of ''Armies'' is that in it Mailer is able to designate the marchers as patriots, a far cry from the criticism that labeled them “draft
dodgers,” “communists,” and “rabble rousers.” In contrast, Mailer describes draft resisters as moral and courageous: “by handing in draft cards, these
young men were committing their future either to prison, emigration, frustration,
or at best, years where everything must be unknown, and that spoke
of a readiness to take moral leaps . . . [and a] faith in one’s ability to react with
grace."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=88}} Mailer recasts draft dodgers as draft resisters, those willing to risk their lives for peace rather than war. Furthermore, Mailer aligns the march itself with America’s long tradition of ostensibly just and triumphant empire-building conflict. He describes the March on the Pentagon as a rite of passage and connects this to a collection of American moments that could be understood as similar rites of passage, for “each generation
of Americans had forged their own rite, in the forest of the Alleghenies and the Adirondacks, at Valley Forge, at New Orleans in 1812, with Rogers and Clark or at Sutter’s Mill, at Gettysburg, the Alamo, the Klondike, the Argonne, Normandy, Pusan."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=308}} Such a comparison implies that without undergoing such crises the U.S. would not have become a sovereign republic, and so the March on the Pentagon is figured as another historic challenge for the country. This lofty rhetoric is meant to stir a reader’s patriotic sympathies, and Mailer is determined that his audience will see the marchers not as subversives but as patriots within the traditions of American democracy.

Mailer understood that “to affect consciousness is thus to shape power” and that his words were shaping people’s perception of the anti-war movement.
Even if his readers were persuaded to believe in a peaceful resolution to the Vietnam War, what would these readers do with this new consciousness,
a consciousness which was “itself a central ingredient in power”{{sfn|Miller|year|p=394}}? It is difficult to measure how readers enact their power, but we can watch how Mailer enacts his own. He undertakes his own civil disobedience, getting arrested in hopes of gaining publicity and offering credence to the
cause of the march, and he understands that his symbolic action must be captured by the press to multiply its effect. When writing the story of ''Armies'',
Mailer tracks his own movement from critic to supporter to war protester to{{pg|488|489}}

prisoner of conscience, and we see that he “feels the claims of imagination
as urgently as the claims of action,"{{sfn|Behar|1970|p=262}} and so he must both examine and act.

''Armies'' represents, for Mailer, a test of his moral strength, an examination of whether Mailer could stand behind his highest moral principles. The story of ''Armies'' offers a way for Mailer to put his philosophy into action and to answer the question, Are you willing to put your life on the line? David Wyatt calls Mailer “a man so obsessed by courage,” which is a persistent theme in Mailer’s famous essay “The White Negro” (1957).{{sfn|Wyatt|2008|p=318}} In many ways ''Armies'' is tied to all of Mailer’s preceding writing. The most obvious connection is to ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' (1967), but the themes and challenges of ''Armies'' are also indebted to ''Cannibals and Christians'' (1966) and ''The Presidential Papers'' (1963). These books variously tested the warrior in Mailer. Even his first book, ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948), plays a role in the conception of ''Armies''. Mary Dearborn claims that ''Armies'' is a recapitulation of his first novel bringing up questions of “confrontation with and the reaction to authority."{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=244}} In ''Armies'', Mailer’s critique of structures of power and his own civil disobedience stands in clear defiance of authoritarian establishments, the same authoritarian establishments which thwarted characters in his previous texts. Mailer’s working out of his own demons in this
journey from author to activist was also meant to engage the hearts and minds of his readers in the important business of opening their eyes to the truth about the war in Vietnam. But it is not just a story about Mailer or the many Mailer characters; Mailer serves as an entry to the predicament of the war in Vietnam and a people’s various ways to protest it.

Mailer admits early in the story his growing belief that his own writing about the Vietnam War is not enough, that “no project had seemed to cost
him enough,” for his writing was one thing, but action was another. And by simply writing about the Vietnam War “he had been suffering more and more in the past few years from the private conviction that he was getting a
little soft, a hint curdled."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=70-1}} This may have served as a barb at
his audience of readers, among whom surely numbered many armchair revolutionaries.
To keep from getting soft and to resist being contented with a
writer’s perspective, he had to move into action himself. He had to actually
take part in the demonstrations, to be physically, not just ideologically in
opposition to the war, but we are not meant to concentrate solely on Mailer’s own struggle. Rather, from his own story of activism he may bring about in {{pg|489|490}}

his readers a new understanding that through the act of reading one becomes
aware, but not yet ''involved'' in a cause. Readers might appreciate that having their consciousness raised was not the same as protesting the war in
their own communities, not at all the same as stepping out into the streets
to form a human protest. One had to move from words to action, from page
to protest.

===Citations===
{{reflist|20em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin}}
* {{citation
| last = Albert
| first = Michael
| title = A Referral from Noam Chomsky
| date = 10 November 2009
| publisher = Message to Katharine Westaway. E-mail.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Baker
| first = Russell
| title = Observer: Dove Antics
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 24 October 1967
| page = 45
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Behar
| first = Jack
| title = History and Fiction
| journal = NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction
| volume = 3
| issue = 3
| year = 1970
| pages = 260–265
| ref = harv
}}
*{{cite magazine
| last = Bergonzi
| first = Bernard
| title = Selected Books
| magazine = London Magazine
| date = November 1968
| pages = 98–100
| quote = Rev. of ''Cannibals and Christians'' and ''Armies of the Night,'' by Norman Mailer.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Dearborn
| first = Mary V.
| title = Mailer: A Biography
| publisher = Houghton Mifflin
| location = Boston
| year = 1999
| ref = harv
}}
* {{citation
| last = Fontaine
| first = Dick
| title = Question for Dick Fontaine
| date = 1 April 2009
| publisher = Message to Katharine Westaway. E-mail.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| editor-last = Gallup
| editor-first = George Horace
| title = Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1935–1971
| volume = 3
| publisher = Random House
| location = New York
| year = 1972
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Gilman
| first = Richard
| title = What Mailer Has Done
| magazine = The New Republic
| date = 8 June 1968
| pages = 27–31
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Isserman
| first = Maurice
| title = The Flower and the Gun
| magazine = The Chronicle of Higher Education
| date = 19 October 2007
| pages = B14–B15
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Kazin
| first = Alfred
| title = The Trouble He’s Seen
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 5 May 1968
| page = BR1
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Lehman
| first = Daniel W.
| title = Matters of Fact: Reading Nonfiction over the Edge
| publisher = Ohio State UP
| location = Columbus
| year = 1997
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = MacFarlane
| first = Scott
| title = The Hippie Narrative: A Literary Perspective on the Counterculture
| publisher = McFarland
| location = Jefferson
| year = 2007
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Mailer
| first = Norman
| title = Advertisements for Myself
| publisher = G. P. Putnam’s Sons
| location = New York
| year = 1959
| ref = harv
}}
* ———. {{cite book
| author =
| title = Existential Aesthetics: An Interview with Norman Mailer
| others = Interview by Laura Adams
| editor-last = Lennon
| editor-first = J. Michael
| book-title = Conversations with Norman Mailer
| publisher = UP of Mississippi
| location = Jackson
| year = 1988
| pages = 207–227
| quote = Rpt. of "Existential Aesthetics: An Interview with Norman Mailer." ''Partisan Review'' 42.2 (1975): 197–214.
| ref = harv
}}
* ———. {{cite book
| author =
| chapter = Prisoner of Success: An Interview with Paul Attanasio
| editor-last = Lennon
| editor-first = J. Michael
| title = Pieces and Pontifications
| publisher = Little, Brown & Company
| location = Boston
| year = 1982
| pages = 129–136
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Manso
| first = Peter
| title = Norman Mailer: His Life and Times
| publisher = Simon and Schuster
| location = New York
| year = 1985
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Miller
| first = Joshua
| title = No Success Like Failure: Existential Politics in Norman Mailer’s ''The Armies of the Night''
| journal = Polity
| volume = 22
| issue = 3
| year = 1990
| pages = 379–396
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Radford
| first = Jean
| chapter = Norman Mailer: The True Story of an American Writer
| editor-last = Gray
| editor-first = Richard
| title = American Fiction: New Readings
| publisher = Vision Press
| location = London
| year = 1983
| pages = 222–237
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Reston
| first = James
| title = Everyone is a Loser
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 23 October 1967
| page = 1
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Roberts
| first = Gene
| title = Wallace Derides War Protesters
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 29 October 1967
| page = 45
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Schueller
| first = Malini Johar
| title = The Politics of Voice: Liberalism and Social Criticism from Franklin to Kingston
| publisher = State University of New York Press
| location = Albany
| year = 1992
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Scott
| first = Nathan A.
| title = Three American Moralists: Mailer, Bellow, Trilling
| publisher = U of Notre Dame P
| location = Notre Dame
| year = 1973
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Small
| first = Melvin
| title = Covering Dissent: The Media and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement
| publisher = Rutgers UP
| location = New Brunswick
| year = 1994
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Streitmatter
| first = Rodger
| title = Mightier Than the Sword: How the News Media Have Shaped American History
| publisher = Westview
| location = Boulder
| year = 1997
| ref = harv
}}
* ———. {{cite book
| author =
| title = Voices of Revolution: The Dissident Press in America
| publisher = Columbia UP
| location = New York
| year = 2001
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Trachtenberg
| first = Alan
| title = Mailer on the Steps of the Pentagon
| magazine = The Nation
| date = 27 May 1968
| pages = 701–702
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Wells
| first = Tom
| title = The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam
| publisher = U of California P
| location = Berkeley
| year = 1994
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Whalen-Bridge
| first = John
| chapter = Norman Mailer
| editor-first = James R.
| editor-last = Giles
| editor2-first = Wanda H.
| editor2-last = Giles
| title = American Novelists Since World War II. Seventh Series
| series = Dictionary of Literary Biography
| volume = 278
| publisher = Gale Group
| location = New York
| year = 2003
| pages = 217–232
| quote = Vol. 278 of ''Dictionary of Literary Biography''. 357 vols. to date. 1978–.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Wyatt
| first = David
| title = Living Out the Sixties
| journal = The Hopkins Review
| volume = 1
| issue = 2
| year = 2008
| pages = 315–332
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last1 = Zaroulis
| first1 = Nancy
| last2 = Sullivan
| first2 = Gerald
| title = Who Spoke Up? American Protest Against the War in Vietnam 1963–1975
| publisher = Doubleday
| location = Garden City
| year = 1984
| ref = harv
}}
{{Refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:“A Noble Pursuit”: The Armies of the Night as Outside Agitator: }}
[[Category:Miscellany (MR)]]

User:Chelsey.brantley/sandbox

2025-04-19T14:27:18Z

Chelsey.brantley: Added page numbers and paragraph

{{user sandbox|plain=yes}}

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}}

{{Byline|last=Westaway|first=Katharine|url=https://prmlr.us/mr07dick|abstract=Mailer has been . . . uniform edition.|note=This paper served . . . me to participate.}}

{{dc|dc=O|n a in weekend in October of 1967,}} tens of thousands of demonstrators
amassed in Washington DC to protest the war in Vietnam. Intending ''The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History'' (1968) to record and commemorate this eventful weekend, Norman Mailer enlarged the march on the Pentagon’s meaning, working as a novelist to make it more
than a four-day set of tremors in the nation’s capital. Some consider the
march a watershed moment, “the first in a chain of events that led to Lyndon
Johnson’s decision . . . to deescalate in Vietnam."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=70}} Mailer’s
nonfiction novel carefully examines this defining event of American history.
Through Mailer’s dual role as a demonstrator and narrator, readers are provided
a rich witness to the many obstacles that were set before marchers in the form of a biased media and government officials opposed to the peace
movement, including the military and police whose physical abuse is featured in the novel.

''Armies'' is also concerned with a sweeping view of American culture ''vis-à-vis'' the march, for this is a “literary project . . . radically committed to a
rendering of the American reality”,{{sfn|Scott|1973|p=18}} and ''Armies'' becomes Mailer’s
attempt to expand upon the march’s implications for the national character.
When ''Armies'' was published, the country was divided over the war in Vietnam; according to a 1967 Gallup poll, when asked whether “the U.S. made a mistake sending troops to Vietnam” forty-six percent said yes while almost an equal amount, forty-four percent, answered no.{{sfn|Gallup|1972|p=2087}} Mailer addresses
the division over the war and also the disparaging of anti-war {{pg|483|484}}
protestors in the mainstream press which created a gulf between mainstream America and the anti-war movement: “from late 1967 into 1968 when Mailer wrote this book, open season on the ‘hippie’ had been tacitly declared."{{sfn|MacFarlane|2007|p=131}} Mailer works to familiarize the populace with these voices of
dissent and to humanize them. The cultural clashes Mailer depicts epitomize the volatility of the U.S. at that moment, the rips in the social fabric that were becoming obvious during the escalation of the Vietnam War.

I will also consider how this novel might have acted as a catalyst for activism
for some contemporary readers and how it worked to coalesce support for the anti-war movement, addressing those Americans who were either unsympathetic towards or even appalled by the anti-war protesters
and challenging readers to see the efficacy and patriotism of the marchers’ cause. It is difficult to gauge the novel’s effectiveness on this front, but I will
consider media coverage and popular reaction to the marchers and to the
book itself. It is in the novelistic form that Mailer shares this moment in history,
and he has said that the reading of novels “is a noble pursuit, that ideally
it profoundly changes the ways in which people perceive their
experience."{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=133}} Mailer understood the great possibility of his
novel to effect change and the opportunity he had to shape readers’ understanding
of what it meant to protest the war in Vietnam.

The political divide was so great in America in the late 1960s that Mailer may have felt obliged to explain one faction to another, to use as a didactic
tool; he was teaching about a counterculture, from which many Americans
were insulated. Scott MacFarlane measures the social turmoil of the times “at a level unseen since the Civil War. The book reading public was clamoring for insight into what was happening on the streets of America."{{sfn|MacFarlane|2007|p=133}} ''Armies'' was a new window into the anti-war movement. The mainstream
media kept Americans in the dark about the anti-war movement. Readers
were witness to Mailer’s own perspective of the counterculture which was not always exhortative: “It was the children in whom Mailer had some hope, a gloomy hope. These mad middle-class children with their lobotomies from
sin, their nihilistic embezzlement of all middle-class moral funds, their innocence,
their lust for apocalypse, their unbelievable indifference to waste."{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=44}} Mailer does not form saints out of the anti-war camp, and
one could not accuse Mailer of being an outright defender of the counterculture.
But through his intimate sketches of the activists and his own experience
as a fellow marcher, we do see images of greatness, of self-sacrifice and {{pg|484|485}}
patriotism. Most important, Mailer, as narrator/protagonist, gives Americans
outside the march a sense of what it was to be a demonstrator.

One of Mailer’s main tasks as an author is to acquaint his readers with the
character of the marchers themselves, so a primary concern of ''Armies'' is media bias as it affected the American public’s sentiments about the acts of resistance happening all around them. But the mainstream press was hawkish:
before the Tet Offensive in January of 1968, “not a single major newspaper
or television network call[ed] for the end to the war."{{sfn|Streitmatter|2001|p=197}} In fact, the mainstream media plainly opposed the anti-war effort “in the heady days early in the war when American correspondents doubled as government handmaidens, they openly condemned anti-war protesters as traitors."{{sfn|Streitmatter|1997|p=201}} This was the atmosphere in which
Mailer attempted to tell a moving tale of the anti-war movement.

Mailer renounces conventional journalism; he doesn’t trust the media to analyze the anti-war movement fairly. Media studies of the time show that
“throughout [the] various stages of escalating involvement, mainstream
American journalists supported the effort, serving as exuberant cheerleaders
for the military."{{sfn|Streitmatter|2001|p=184}} Mailer frequently points out
the unfair coverage that the press gave to the actions of the demonstrators
and how "[e]mphasis was put on every rock thrown, and a count was made of the windows broken. (There were, however, only a few.) But there was no
specific mention of The Wedge [a brutal crowd control technique, which resulted
in beating of the marchers]. Indeed, stories [of police brutality]
quickly disappeared."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=313-14}} This becomes evident as Mailer distinguishes
the reporting of mainstream press from that of the alternative
press. The alternative press (such as the ''Catholic Worker'', ''I.F. Stone’s Weekly,
''National Guardian'', and ''Ramparts'') was critical of the war going back in some
cases to the 1950s when troops were first deployed to Vietnam.{{sfn|Streitmatter|2001|p=184}}

One of the most damning charges in the book is the brutality perpetrated
against the marchers, who were for the most part peacefully protesting; some
protestors were “clubbed until they were broken and bloody."{{sfn|Zaroulis and Sullivan|1984|p=138}} The abuse was amplified by the fact that it often went unreported.
For the reports of police violence, Mailer relies upon outside sources
because he had been arrested early in the demonstration before most of the
violence occurred. Yet he gains credibility when integrating outside witnesses
and reportage into a book that was mostly reported from his standpoint,{{pg|485|486}}
and these external sources may have lent more authority to the charge that
protesters were abused. For any journalist there was difficulty in covering
something as large as the march on the Pentagon “because of the extensive
terrain in question and the rapid movements of the protestors and soldiers."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=72}} Acting as a novelist-journalist, Mailer collects varied media accounts
of the march and weaves them into the narrative; here he features
one Leftist perspective of the march, identifying the witness as “Harvey
Mayes of the English Department at Hunter”:
<blockquote>One soldier spilled the water from his canteen on the ground in order to add to the discomfort of the female demonstrator at his feet. She cursed him—understandably, I think—and shifted her body. She lost her balance and her shoulder hit the rifle at the soldier’s side. He raised the rifle, and with its butt, came down hard on the girl’s leg. The girl tried to move back but was not fast enough to avoid the billy-club of a soldier in the second row of the troops. At least four times that soldier hit her with all his force.{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=303}}</blockquote>
Mailer was obliged to portray the graphic scenes from the march which were missing in many media reports. Perhaps the stories of abuse were reported on more by the Left media because the Left journalists were among the protestors, down in the tussle, while mainstream reporters observed from a safe
distance, avoiding a potential encounter with violent police.

Mailer also gave accounts of “the [mainstream] press [who were], in the
aftermath, antagonistic to the March” and so included passages of an article from the ''New York Times'' which stated that “[i]t is difficult to report publicly the ugly and vulgar provocation of many of the militants. They spat on some
of the soldiers in the front line at the Pentagon and goaded them with the most vicious personal slander. . . . [M]any officials here are surprised that
there was not much more violence."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=313}} Notice that the ''Times'' does not mention any specific violence of the MPs. Numerous commentators condemned ''not'' the beatings meted out to the demonstrators, but the protest
itself; David Brinkley called it a “coarse, vulgar episode."{{sfn|Wells|1994|p=202-3}} However,
Maurice Isserman, one marcher, remembers the marchers for the most part as peaceful, remaining “pretty true to Gandhian principles."{{sfn|Isserman|2007|p=B15}}

In looking beyond Mailer’s collection of media accounts of the march, it{{pg|486|487}}

is clear that he wasn’t exaggerating the bias against anti-war activists. The
''New York Times'' reported that Robert McNamara felt his soldiers showed “restraint . . . under provocation,"{{sfn|Reston|1967|p=1}} and in one article the protesters
were referred to as “scum of the universe”{{sfn|Roberts|1967|p=45}}; another report called the demonstration “mass paranoia . . . elicit[ing] a great deal of foolishness."{{sfn|Baker|1967|p=45}} What the press wrote about the protestors was not always so disparaging, but rarely was the message of the marchers given much time, and this sort of mainstream coverage was the only information readily
available to the general public about the anti-war movement. Some of the first reports of the march on and the siege of the Pentagon were missing reports of police violence because the reporters went home late Saturday
night before the police began employing more militant tactics. But on Monday in another story of the march the ''New York Times'' still ignored “the bloody military sweep of early Sunday morning;” the ''Washington Post''’s Monday coverage was similar in that it “continued to emphasize the violence
of the protestors, not the defenders of the Pentagon."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=76, 78}} ''Time'' came out with its story a few days after the march on October 27 in which they marginalized the protestors as “left-wing radicals, hippies, acid
heads, and people with painted faces in bizarre costumes” while at the same time “applaud[ing] the government for its restraint."{{sfn|Small|1994|p=79-80}}

Mailer is unwilling to let the picture that the mainstream press drew of demonstrators become the only permanent record, and“he scolded the press for their lies, and their misrepresentation, for their guilt in creating a psychology over the last twenty years in the average American which made wars like Vietnam possible."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=93}} Mailer understands that the press is pivotal in a nation’s critique of its culture and policies, and he takes the press to task for their failure to cultivate an informed public. Eventually, Mailer’s ''Armies'' would stand with media accounts as a record of the event. Before ''Armies'' was published as a book in 1968, it appeared in periodicals (almost the entire issues of ''Harper’s'' and ''Commentary'' were given to this story). So
Mailer responded to the mass media’s “forest of inaccuracy” first in popular periodicals and then in book form. According to Dick Fontaine, a British filmmaker who was filming a documentary of Mailer over the weekend of
the march, “Norman remembered, with frightening accuracy, minutes and minutes, pages and pages, of the dialogues he was having with the others, let alone, of course, the brilliant descriptions of time, place and mood. . . . His
memory and interpretations of . . . [these events] are truly breathtaking.”{{pg|487|488}}

This speaks well of Mailer’s journalistic sensibilities and his hope to avoid a
forest of inaccuracies himself. To this end, it is important to recall that ''Armies''
won a Polk Award for excellence in journalism.

One of the achievements of ''Armies'' is that in it Mailer is able to designate the marchers as patriots, a far cry from the criticism that labeled them “draft
dodgers,” “communists,” and “rabble rousers.” In contrast, Mailer describes draft resisters as moral and courageous: “by handing in draft cards, these
young men were committing their future either to prison, emigration, frustration,
or at best, years where everything must be unknown, and that spoke
of a readiness to take moral leaps . . . [and a] faith in one’s ability to react with
grace."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=88}} Mailer recasts draft dodgers as draft resisters, those willing to risk their lives for peace rather than war. Furthermore, Mailer aligns the march itself with America’s long tradition of ostensibly just and triumphant empire-building conflict. He describes the March on the Pentagon as a rite of passage and connects this to a collection of American moments that could be understood as similar rites of passage, for “each generation
of Americans had forged their own rite, in the forest of the Alleghenies and the Adirondacks, at Valley Forge, at New Orleans in 1812, with Rogers and Clark or at Sutter’s Mill, at Gettysburg, the Alamo, the Klondike, the Argonne, Normandy, Pusan."{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=308}} Such a comparison implies that without undergoing such crises the U.S. would not have become a sovereign republic, and so the March on the Pentagon is figured as another historic challenge for the country. This lofty rhetoric is meant to stir a reader’s patriotic sympathies, and Mailer is determined that his audience will see the marchers not as subversives but as patriots within the traditions of American democracy.

Mailer understood that “to affect consciousness is thus to shape power” and that his words were shaping people’s perception of the anti-war movement.
Even if his readers were persuaded to believe in a peaceful resolution to the Vietnam War, what would these readers do with this new consciousness,
a consciousness which was “itself a central ingredient in power”{{sfn|Miller|year|p=394}}? It is difficult to measure how readers enact their power, but we can watch how Mailer enacts his own. He undertakes his own civil disobedience, getting arrested in hopes of gaining publicity and offering credence to the
cause of the march, and he understands that his symbolic action must be captured by the press to multiply its effect. When writing the story of ''Armies'',
Mailer tracks his own movement from critic to supporter to war protester to{{pg|488|489}}

prisoner of conscience, and we see that he “feels the claims of imagination
as urgently as the claims of action,"{{sfn|Behar|1970|p=262}} and so he must both examine and act.

''Armies'' represents, for Mailer, a test of his moral strength, an examination of whether Mailer could stand behind his highest moral principles. The story of ''Armies'' offers a way for Mailer to put his philosophy into action and to answer the question, Are you willing to put your life on the line? David Wyatt calls Mailer “a man so obsessed by courage,” which is a persistent theme in Mailer’s famous essay “The White Negro” (1957).{{sfn|Wyatt|2008|p=318}} In many ways ''Armies'' is tied to all of Mailer’s preceding writing. The most obvious connection is to ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' (1967), but the themes and challenges of ''Armies'' are also indebted to ''Cannibals and Christians'' (1966) and ''The Presidential Papers'' (1963). These books variously tested the warrior in Mailer. Even his first book, ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948), plays a role in the conception of ''Armies''. Mary Dearborn claims that ''Armies'' is a recapitulation of his first novel bringing up questions of “confrontation with and the reaction to authority."{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=244}} In ''Armies'', Mailer’s critique of structures of power and his own civil disobedience stands in clear defiance of authoritarian establishments, the same authoritarian establishments which thwarted characters in his previous texts. Mailer’s working out of his own demons in this
journey from author to activist was also meant to engage the hearts and minds of his readers in the important business of opening their eyes to the truth about the war in Vietnam. But it is not just a story about Mailer or the many Mailer characters; Mailer serves as an entry to the predicament of the war in Vietnam and a people’s various ways to protest it.

===Citations===
{{reflist|20em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin}}
* {{citation
| last = Albert
| first = Michael
| title = A Referral from Noam Chomsky
| date = 10 November 2009
| publisher = Message to Katharine Westaway. E-mail.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Baker
| first = Russell
| title = Observer: Dove Antics
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 24 October 1967
| page = 45
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Behar
| first = Jack
| title = History and Fiction
| journal = NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction
| volume = 3
| issue = 3
| year = 1970
| pages = 260–265
| ref = harv
}}
*{{cite magazine
| last = Bergonzi
| first = Bernard
| title = Selected Books
| magazine = London Magazine
| date = November 1968
| pages = 98–100
| quote = Rev. of ''Cannibals and Christians'' and ''Armies of the Night,'' by Norman Mailer.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Dearborn
| first = Mary V.
| title = Mailer: A Biography
| publisher = Houghton Mifflin
| location = Boston
| year = 1999
| ref = harv
}}
* {{citation
| last = Fontaine
| first = Dick
| title = Question for Dick Fontaine
| date = 1 April 2009
| publisher = Message to Katharine Westaway. E-mail.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| editor-last = Gallup
| editor-first = George Horace
| title = Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1935–1971
| volume = 3
| publisher = Random House
| location = New York
| year = 1972
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Gilman
| first = Richard
| title = What Mailer Has Done
| magazine = The New Republic
| date = 8 June 1968
| pages = 27–31
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Isserman
| first = Maurice
| title = The Flower and the Gun
| magazine = The Chronicle of Higher Education
| date = 19 October 2007
| pages = B14–B15
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Kazin
| first = Alfred
| title = The Trouble He’s Seen
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 5 May 1968
| page = BR1
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Lehman
| first = Daniel W.
| title = Matters of Fact: Reading Nonfiction over the Edge
| publisher = Ohio State UP
| location = Columbus
| year = 1997
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = MacFarlane
| first = Scott
| title = The Hippie Narrative: A Literary Perspective on the Counterculture
| publisher = McFarland
| location = Jefferson
| year = 2007
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Mailer
| first = Norman
| title = Advertisements for Myself
| publisher = G. P. Putnam’s Sons
| location = New York
| year = 1959
| ref = harv
}}
* ———. {{cite book
| author =
| title = Existential Aesthetics: An Interview with Norman Mailer
| others = Interview by Laura Adams
| editor-last = Lennon
| editor-first = J. Michael
| book-title = Conversations with Norman Mailer
| publisher = UP of Mississippi
| location = Jackson
| year = 1988
| pages = 207–227
| quote = Rpt. of "Existential Aesthetics: An Interview with Norman Mailer." ''Partisan Review'' 42.2 (1975): 197–214.
| ref = harv
}}
* ———. {{cite book
| author =
| chapter = Prisoner of Success: An Interview with Paul Attanasio
| editor-last = Lennon
| editor-first = J. Michael
| title = Pieces and Pontifications
| publisher = Little, Brown & Company
| location = Boston
| year = 1982
| pages = 129–136
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Manso
| first = Peter
| title = Norman Mailer: His Life and Times
| publisher = Simon and Schuster
| location = New York
| year = 1985
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Miller
| first = Joshua
| title = No Success Like Failure: Existential Politics in Norman Mailer’s ''The Armies of the Night''
| journal = Polity
| volume = 22
| issue = 3
| year = 1990
| pages = 379–396
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Radford
| first = Jean
| chapter = Norman Mailer: The True Story of an American Writer
| editor-last = Gray
| editor-first = Richard
| title = American Fiction: New Readings
| publisher = Vision Press
| location = London
| year = 1983
| pages = 222–237
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Reston
| first = James
| title = Everyone is a Loser
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 23 October 1967
| page = 1
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Roberts
| first = Gene
| title = Wallace Derides War Protesters
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 29 October 1967
| page = 45
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Schueller
| first = Malini Johar
| title = The Politics of Voice: Liberalism and Social Criticism from Franklin to Kingston
| publisher = State University of New York Press
| location = Albany
| year = 1992
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Scott
| first = Nathan A.
| title = Three American Moralists: Mailer, Bellow, Trilling
| publisher = U of Notre Dame P
| location = Notre Dame
| year = 1973
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Small
| first = Melvin
| title = Covering Dissent: The Media and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement
| publisher = Rutgers UP
| location = New Brunswick
| year = 1994
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Streitmatter
| first = Rodger
| title = Mightier Than the Sword: How the News Media Have Shaped American History
| publisher = Westview
| location = Boulder
| year = 1997
| ref = harv
}}
* ———. {{cite book
| author =
| title = Voices of Revolution: The Dissident Press in America
| publisher = Columbia UP
| location = New York
| year = 2001
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Trachtenberg
| first = Alan
| title = Mailer on the Steps of the Pentagon
| magazine = The Nation
| date = 27 May 1968
| pages = 701–702
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Wells
| first = Tom
| title = The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam
| publisher = U of California P
| location = Berkeley
| year = 1994
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Whalen-Bridge
| first = John
| chapter = Norman Mailer
| editor-first = James R.
| editor-last = Giles
| editor2-first = Wanda H.
| editor2-last = Giles
| title = American Novelists Since World War II. Seventh Series
| series = Dictionary of Literary Biography
| volume = 278
| publisher = Gale Group
| location = New York
| year = 2003
| pages = 217–232
| quote = Vol. 278 of ''Dictionary of Literary Biography''. 357 vols. to date. 1978–.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Wyatt
| first = David
| title = Living Out the Sixties
| journal = The Hopkins Review
| volume = 1
| issue = 2
| year = 2008
| pages = 315–332
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last1 = Zaroulis
| first1 = Nancy
| last2 = Sullivan
| first2 = Gerald
| title = Who Spoke Up? American Protest Against the War in Vietnam 1963–1975
| publisher = Doubleday
| location = Garden City
| year = 1984
| ref = harv
}}
{{Refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:“A Noble Pursuit”: The Armies of the Night as Outside Agitator: }}
[[Category:Miscellany (MR)]]

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The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/“A Noble Pursuit”: The Armies of the Night as Outside Agitator

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{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{Byline|last=Westaway|first=Katharine|url=https://prmlr.us/mr07dick|abstract=Mailer has been . . . uniform edition.|note=This paper served . . . me to participate.}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:“A Noble Pursuit”: The Armies of the Night as Outside Agitator: }}
[[Category:Miscellany (MR)]]

User:Chelsey.brantley/sandbox

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{{user sandbox|plain=yes}}

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}}
{{Byline|last=Westaway|first=Katharine|url=https://prmlr.us/mr07dick|abstract=Mailer has been . . . uniform edition.|note=This paper served . . . me to participate.}}


===Citations===
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin}}
* {{citation
| last = Albert
| first = Michael
| title = A Referral from Noam Chomsky
| date = 10 November 2009
| publisher = Message to Katharine Westaway. E-mail.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Baker
| first = Russell
| title = Observer: Dove Antics
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 24 October 1967
| page = 45
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Behar
| first = Jack
| title = History and Fiction
| journal = NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction
| volume = 3
| issue = 3
| year = 1970
| pages = 260–265
| ref = harv
}}
*{{cite magazine
| last = Bergonzi
| first = Bernard
| title = Selected Books
| magazine = London Magazine
| date = November 1968
| pages = 98–100
| quote = Rev. of ''Cannibals and Christians'' and ''Armies of the Night,'' by Norman Mailer.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Dearborn
| first = Mary V.
| title = Mailer: A Biography
| publisher = Houghton Mifflin
| location = Boston
| year = 1999
| ref = harv
}}
* {{citation
| last = Fontaine
| first = Dick
| title = Question for Dick Fontaine
| date = 1 April 2009
| publisher = Message to Katharine Westaway. E-mail.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| editor-last = Gallup
| editor-first = George Horace
| title = Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1935–1971
| volume = 3
| publisher = Random House
| location = New York
| year = 1972
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Gilman
| first = Richard
| title = What Mailer Has Done
| magazine = The New Republic
| date = 8 June 1968
| pages = 27–31
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Isserman
| first = Maurice
| title = The Flower and the Gun
| magazine = The Chronicle of Higher Education
| date = 19 October 2007
| pages = B14–B15
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Kazin
| first = Alfred
| title = The Trouble He’s Seen
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 5 May 1968
| page = BR1
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Lehman
| first = Daniel W.
| title = Matters of Fact: Reading Nonfiction over the Edge
| publisher = Ohio State UP
| location = Columbus
| year = 1997
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = MacFarlane
| first = Scott
| title = The Hippie Narrative: A Literary Perspective on the Counterculture
| publisher = McFarland
| location = Jefferson
| year = 2007
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Mailer
| first = Norman
| title = Advertisements for Myself
| publisher = G. P. Putnam’s Sons
| location = New York
| year = 1959
| ref = harv
}}
* ———. {{cite book
| author =
| title = Existential Aesthetics: An Interview with Norman Mailer
| others = Interview by Laura Adams
| editor-last = Lennon
| editor-first = J. Michael
| book-title = Conversations with Norman Mailer
| publisher = UP of Mississippi
| location = Jackson
| year = 1988
| pages = 207–227
| quote = Rpt. of "Existential Aesthetics: An Interview with Norman Mailer." ''Partisan Review'' 42.2 (1975): 197–214.
| ref = harv
}}
* ———. {{cite book
| author =
| chapter = Prisoner of Success: An Interview with Paul Attanasio
| editor-last = Lennon
| editor-first = J. Michael
| title = Pieces and Pontifications
| publisher = Little, Brown & Company
| location = Boston
| year = 1982
| pages = 129–136
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Manso
| first = Peter
| title = Norman Mailer: His Life and Times
| publisher = Simon and Schuster
| location = New York
| year = 1985
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Miller
| first = Joshua
| title = No Success Like Failure: Existential Politics in Norman Mailer’s ''The Armies of the Night''
| journal = Polity
| volume = 22
| issue = 3
| year = 1990
| pages = 379–396
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Radford
| first = Jean
| chapter = Norman Mailer: The True Story of an American Writer
| editor-last = Gray
| editor-first = Richard
| title = American Fiction: New Readings
| publisher = Vision Press
| location = London
| year = 1983
| pages = 222–237
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Reston
| first = James
| title = Everyone is a Loser
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 23 October 1967
| page = 1
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Roberts
| first = Gene
| title = Wallace Derides War Protesters
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 29 October 1967
| page = 45
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Schueller
| first = Malini Johar
| title = The Politics of Voice: Liberalism and Social Criticism from Franklin to Kingston
| publisher = State University of New York Press
| location = Albany
| year = 1992
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Scott
| first = Nathan A.
| title = Three American Moralists: Mailer, Bellow, Trilling
| publisher = U of Notre Dame P
| location = Notre Dame
| year = 1973
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Small
| first = Melvin
| title = Covering Dissent: The Media and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement
| publisher = Rutgers UP
| location = New Brunswick
| year = 1994
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Streitmatter
| first = Rodger
| title = Mightier Than the Sword: How the News Media Have Shaped American History
| publisher = Westview
| location = Boulder
| year = 1997
| ref = harv
}}
* ———. {{cite book
| author =
| title = Voices of Revolution: The Dissident Press in America
| publisher = Columbia UP
| location = New York
| year = 2001
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Trachtenberg
| first = Alan
| title = Mailer on the Steps of the Pentagon
| magazine = The Nation
| date = 27 May 1968
| pages = 701–702
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Wells
| first = Tom
| title = The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam
| publisher = U of California P
| location = Berkeley
| year = 1994
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Whalen-Bridge
| first = John
| chapter = Norman Mailer
| editor-first = James R.
| editor-last = Giles
| editor2-first = Wanda H.
| editor2-last = Giles
| title = American Novelists Since World War II. Seventh Series
| series = Dictionary of Literary Biography
| volume = 278
| publisher = Gale Group
| location = New York
| year = 2003
| pages = 217–232
| quote = Vol. 278 of ''Dictionary of Literary Biography''. 357 vols. to date. 1978–.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Wyatt
| first = David
| title = Living Out the Sixties
| journal = The Hopkins Review
| volume = 1
| issue = 2
| year = 2008
| pages = 315–332
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last1 = Zaroulis
| first1 = Nancy
| last2 = Sullivan
| first2 = Gerald
| title = Who Spoke Up? American Protest Against the War in Vietnam 1963–1975
| publisher = Doubleday
| location = Garden City
| year = 1984
| ref = harv
}}
{{Refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:“A Noble Pursuit”: The Armies of the Night as Outside Agitator: }}
[[Category:Miscellany (MR)]]

User:Chelsey.brantley/sandbox

2025-04-19T04:52:04Z

Chelsey.brantley: Added Citations section

User:Chelsey.brantley/sandbox

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Chelsey.brantley: Added more citations

{{user sandbox|plain=yes}}

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}}
{{Byline|last=Westaway|first=Katharine|url=https://prmlr.us/mr07dick|abstract=Mailer has been . . . uniform edition.|note=This paper served . . . me to participate.}}


===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin}}
* {{citation
| last = Albert
| first = Michael
| title = A Referral from Noam Chomsky
| date = 10 November 2009
| publisher = Message to Katharine Westaway. E-mail.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Baker
| first = Russell
| title = Observer: Dove Antics
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 24 October 1967
| page = 45
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Behar
| first = Jack
| title = History and Fiction
| journal = NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction
| volume = 3
| issue = 3
| year = 1970
| pages = 260–265
| ref = harv
}}
*{{cite magazine
| last = Bergonzi
| first = Bernard
| title = Selected Books
| magazine = London Magazine
| date = November 1968
| pages = 98–100
| quote = Rev. of ''Cannibals and Christians'' and ''Armies of the Night,'' by Norman Mailer.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Dearborn
| first = Mary V.
| title = Mailer: A Biography
| publisher = Houghton Mifflin
| location = Boston
| year = 1999
| ref = harv
}}
* {{citation
| last = Fontaine
| first = Dick
| title = Question for Dick Fontaine
| date = 1 April 2009
| publisher = Message to Katharine Westaway. E-mail.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| editor-last = Gallup
| editor-first = George Horace
| title = Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1935–1971
| volume = 3
| publisher = Random House
| location = New York
| year = 1972
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Gilman
| first = Richard
| title = What Mailer Has Done
| magazine = The New Republic
| date = 8 June 1968
| pages = 27–31
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Isserman
| first = Maurice
| title = The Flower and the Gun
| magazine = The Chronicle of Higher Education
| date = 19 October 2007
| pages = B14–B15
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Kazin
| first = Alfred
| title = The Trouble He’s Seen
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 5 May 1968
| page = BR1
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Lehman
| first = Daniel W.
| title = Matters of Fact: Reading Nonfiction over the Edge
| publisher = Ohio State UP
| location = Columbus
| year = 1997
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = MacFarlane
| first = Scott
| title = The Hippie Narrative: A Literary Perspective on the Counterculture
| publisher = McFarland
| location = Jefferson
| year = 2007
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Mailer
| first = Norman
| title = Advertisements for Myself
| publisher = G. P. Putnam’s Sons
| location = New York
| year = 1959
| ref = harv
}}
* ———. {{cite book
| author =
| title = Existential Aesthetics: An Interview with Norman Mailer
| others = Interview by Laura Adams
| editor-last = Lennon
| editor-first = J. Michael
| book-title = Conversations with Norman Mailer
| publisher = UP of Mississippi
| location = Jackson
| year = 1988
| pages = 207–227
| quote = Rpt. of "Existential Aesthetics: An Interview with Norman Mailer." ''Partisan Review'' 42.2 (1975): 197–214.
| ref = harv
}}
* ———. {{cite book
| author =
| chapter = Prisoner of Success: An Interview with Paul Attanasio
| editor-last = Lennon
| editor-first = J. Michael
| title = Pieces and Pontifications
| publisher = Little, Brown & Company
| location = Boston
| year = 1982
| pages = 129–136
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Manso
| first = Peter
| title = Norman Mailer: His Life and Times
| publisher = Simon and Schuster
| location = New York
| year = 1985
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Miller
| first = Joshua
| title = No Success Like Failure: Existential Politics in Norman Mailer’s ''The Armies of the Night''
| journal = Polity
| volume = 22
| issue = 3
| year = 1990
| pages = 379–396
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Radford
| first = Jean
| chapter = Norman Mailer: The True Story of an American Writer
| editor-last = Gray
| editor-first = Richard
| title = American Fiction: New Readings
| publisher = Vision Press
| location = London
| year = 1983
| pages = 222–237
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Reston
| first = James
| title = Everyone is a Loser
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 23 October 1967
| page = 1
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Roberts
| first = Gene
| title = Wallace Derides War Protesters
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 29 October 1967
| page = 45
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Schueller
| first = Malini Johar
| title = The Politics of Voice: Liberalism and Social Criticism from Franklin to Kingston
| publisher = State University of New York Press
| location = Albany
| year = 1992
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Scott
| first = Nathan A.
| title = Three American Moralists: Mailer, Bellow, Trilling
| publisher = U of Notre Dame P
| location = Notre Dame
| year = 1973
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Small
| first = Melvin
| title = Covering Dissent: The Media and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement
| publisher = Rutgers UP
| location = New Brunswick
| year = 1994
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Streitmatter
| first = Rodger
| title = Mightier Than the Sword: How the News Media Have Shaped American History
| publisher = Westview
| location = Boulder
| year = 1997
| ref = harv
}}
* ———. {{cite book
| author =
| title = Voices of Revolution: The Dissident Press in America
| publisher = Columbia UP
| location = New York
| year = 2001
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Trachtenberg
| first = Alan
| title = Mailer on the Steps of the Pentagon
| magazine = The Nation
| date = 27 May 1968
| pages = 701–702
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Wells
| first = Tom
| title = The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam
| publisher = U of California P
| location = Berkeley
| year = 1994
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Whalen-Bridge
| first = John
| chapter = Norman Mailer
| editor-first = James R.
| editor-last = Giles
| editor2-first = Wanda H.
| editor2-last = Giles
| title = American Novelists Since World War II. Seventh Series
| series = Dictionary of Literary Biography
| volume = 278
| publisher = Gale Group
| location = New York
| year = 2003
| pages = 217–232
| quote = Vol. 278 of ''Dictionary of Literary Biography''. 357 vols. to date. 1978–.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Wyatt
| first = David
| title = Living Out the Sixties
| journal = The Hopkins Review
| volume = 1
| issue = 2
| year = 2008
| pages = 315–332
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last1 = Zaroulis
| first1 = Nancy
| last2 = Sullivan
| first2 = Gerald
| title = Who Spoke Up? American Protest Against the War in Vietnam 1963–1975
| publisher = Doubleday
| location = Garden City
| year = 1984
| ref = harv
}}
{{Refend}}

User:Chelsey.brantley/sandbox

2025-04-19T04:35:44Z

Chelsey.brantley: /* Works Cited */ Added more citations

{{user sandbox|plain=yes}}

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}}
{{Byline|last=Westaway|first=Katharine|url=https://prmlr.us/mr07dick|abstract=Mailer has been . . . uniform edition.|note=This paper served . . . me to participate.}}


===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin}}
* {{cite news
| last = Baker
| first = Russell
| title = Observer: Dove Antics
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 24 October 1967
| page = 45
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Behar
| first = Jack
| title = History and Fiction
| journal = NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction
| volume = 3
| issue = 3
| year = 1970
| pages = 260–265
| ref = harv
}}
*{{cite magazine
| last = Bergonzi
| first = Bernard
| title = Selected Books
| magazine = London Magazine
| date = November 1968
| pages = 98–100
| quote = Rev. of ''Cannibals and Christians'' and ''Armies of the Night,'' by Norman Mailer.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Dearborn
| first = Mary V.
| title = Mailer: A Biography
| publisher = Houghton Mifflin
| location = Boston
| year = 1999
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| editor-last = Gallup
| editor-first = George Horace
| title = Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1935–1971
| volume = 3
| publisher = Random House
| location = New York
| year = 1972
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Gilman
| first = Richard
| title = What Mailer Has Done
| magazine = The New Republic
| date = 8 June 1968
| pages = 27–31
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Isserman
| first = Maurice
| title = The Flower and the Gun
| magazine = The Chronicle of Higher Education
| date = 19 October 2007
| pages = B14–B15
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Kazin
| first = Alfred
| title = The Trouble He’s Seen
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 5 May 1968
| page = BR1
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Lehman
| first = Daniel W.
| title = Matters of Fact: Reading Nonfiction over the Edge
| publisher = Ohio State UP
| location = Columbus
| year = 1997
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = MacFarlane
| first = Scott
| title = The Hippie Narrative: A Literary Perspective on the Counterculture
| publisher = McFarland
| location = Jefferson
| year = 2007
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Mailer
| first = Norman
| title = Advertisements for Myself
| publisher = G. P. Putnam’s Sons
| location = New York
| year = 1959
| ref = harv
}}
* ———. {{cite book
| author =
| title = Existential Aesthetics: An Interview with Norman Mailer
| others = Interview by Laura Adams
| editor-last = Lennon
| editor-first = J. Michael
| book-title = Conversations with Norman Mailer
| publisher = UP of Mississippi
| location = Jackson
| year = 1988
| pages = 207–227
| quote = Rpt. of "Existential Aesthetics: An Interview with Norman Mailer." ''Partisan Review'' 42.2 (1975): 197–214.
| ref = harv
}}
* ———. {{cite book
| author =
| chapter = Prisoner of Success: An Interview with Paul Attanasio
| editor-last = Lennon
| editor-first = J. Michael
| title = Pieces and Pontifications
| publisher = Little, Brown & Company
| location = Boston
| year = 1982
| pages = 129–136
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Manso
| first = Peter
| title = Norman Mailer: His Life and Times
| publisher = Simon and Schuster
| location = New York
| year = 1985
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Miller
| first = Joshua
| title = No Success Like Failure: Existential Politics in Norman Mailer’s ''The Armies of the Night''
| journal = Polity
| volume = 22
| issue = 3
| year = 1990
| pages = 379–396
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Radford
| first = Jean
| chapter = Norman Mailer: The True Story of an American Writer
| editor-last = Gray
| editor-first = Richard
| title = American Fiction: New Readings
| publisher = Vision Press
| location = London
| year = 1983
| pages = 222–237
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Reston
| first = James
| title = Everyone is a Loser
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 23 October 1967
| page = 1
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Roberts
| first = Gene
| title = Wallace Derides War Protesters
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 29 October 1967
| page = 45
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Schueller
| first = Malini Johar
| title = The Politics of Voice: Liberalism and Social Criticism from Franklin to Kingston
| publisher = State University of New York Press
| location = Albany
| year = 1992
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Scott
| first = Nathan A.
| title = Three American Moralists: Mailer, Bellow, Trilling
| publisher = U of Notre Dame P
| location = Notre Dame
| year = 1973
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Small
| first = Melvin
| title = Covering Dissent: The Media and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement
| publisher = Rutgers UP
| location = New Brunswick
| year = 1994
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Streitmatter
| first = Rodger
| title = Mightier Than the Sword: How the News Media Have Shaped American History
| publisher = Westview
| location = Boulder
| year = 1997
| ref = harv
}}
* ———. {{cite book
| author =
| title = Voices of Revolution: The Dissident Press in America
| publisher = Columbia UP
| location = New York
| year = 2001
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Trachtenberg
| first = Alan
| title = Mailer on the Steps of the Pentagon
| magazine = The Nation
| date = 27 May 1968
| pages = 701–702
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Wells
| first = Tom
| title = The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam
| publisher = U of California P
| location = Berkeley
| year = 1994
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Whalen-Bridge
| first = John
| chapter = Norman Mailer
| editor-first = James R.
| editor-last = Giles
| editor2-first = Wanda H.
| editor2-last = Giles
| title = American Novelists Since World War II. Seventh Series
| series = Dictionary of Literary Biography
| volume = 278
| publisher = Gale Group
| location = New York
| year = 2003
| pages = 217–232
| quote = Vol. 278 of ''Dictionary of Literary Biography''. 357 vols. to date. 1978–.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Wyatt
| first = David
| title = Living Out the Sixties
| journal = The Hopkins Review
| volume = 1
| issue = 2
| year = 2008
| pages = 315–332
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last1 = Zaroulis
| first1 = Nancy
| last2 = Sullivan
| first2 = Gerald
| title = Who Spoke Up? American Protest Against the War in Vietnam 1963–1975
| publisher = Doubleday
| location = Garden City
| year = 1984
| ref = harv
}}
{{Refend}}

User:Chelsey.brantley/sandbox

2025-04-19T04:29:38Z

Chelsey.brantley: /* Works Cited */ Added more citations

{{user sandbox|plain=yes}}

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}}
{{Byline|last=Westaway|first=Katharine|url=https://prmlr.us/mr07dick|abstract=Mailer has been . . . uniform edition.|note=This paper served . . . me to participate.}}


===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin}}
* {{cite news
| last = Baker
| first = Russell
| title = Observer: Dove Antics
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 24 October 1967
| page = 45
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Behar
| first = Jack
| title = History and Fiction
| journal = NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction
| volume = 3
| issue = 3
| year = 1970
| pages = 260–265
| ref = harv
}}
*{{cite magazine
| last = Bergonzi
| first = Bernard
| title = Selected Books
| magazine = London Magazine
| date = November 1968
| pages = 98–100
| quote = Rev. of ''Cannibals and Christians'' and ''Armies of the Night,'' by Norman Mailer.
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Dearborn
| first = Mary V.
| title = Mailer: A Biography
| publisher = Houghton Mifflin
| location = Boston
| year = 1999
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| editor-last = Gallup
| editor-first = George Horace
| title = Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1935–1971
| volume = 3
| publisher = Random House
| location = New York
| year = 1972
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Gilman
| first = Richard
| title = What Mailer Has Done
| magazine = The New Republic
| date = 8 June 1968
| pages = 27–31
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Isserman
| first = Maurice
| title = The Flower and the Gun
| magazine = The Chronicle of Higher Education
| date = 19 October 2007
| pages = B14–B15
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Kazin
| first = Alfred
| title = The Trouble He’s Seen
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 5 May 1968
| page = BR1
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Lehman
| first = Daniel W.
| title = Matters of Fact: Reading Nonfiction over the Edge
| publisher = Ohio State UP
| location = Columbus
| year = 1997
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = MacFarlane
| first = Scott
| title = The Hippie Narrative: A Literary Perspective on the Counterculture
| publisher = McFarland
| location = Jefferson
| year = 2007
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Mailer
| first = Norman
| title = Advertisements for Myself
| publisher = G. P. Putnam’s Sons
| location = New York
| year = 1959
| ref = harv
}}
* ———. {{cite book
| author =
| title = Existential Aesthetics: An Interview with Norman Mailer
| others = Interview by Laura Adams
| editor-last = Lennon
| editor-first = J. Michael
| book-title = Conversations with Norman Mailer
| publisher = UP of Mississippi
| location = Jackson
| year = 1988
| pages = 207–227
| quote = Rpt. of "Existential Aesthetics: An Interview with Norman Mailer." ''Partisan Review'' 42.2 (1975): 197–214.
| ref = harv
}}
* ———. {{cite book
| author =
| chapter = Prisoner of Success: An Interview with Paul Attanasio
| editor-last = Lennon
| editor-first = J. Michael
| title = Pieces and Pontifications
| publisher = Little, Brown & Company
| location = Boston
| year = 1982
| pages = 129–136
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Manso
| first = Peter
| title = Norman Mailer: His Life and Times
| publisher = Simon and Schuster
| location = New York
| year = 1985
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite journal
| last = Miller
| first = Joshua
| title = No Success Like Failure: Existential Politics in Norman Mailer’s ''The Armies of the Night''
| journal = Polity
| volume = 22
| issue = 3
| year = 1990
| pages = 379–396
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Radford
| first = Jean
| chapter = Norman Mailer: The True Story of an American Writer
| editor-last = Gray
| editor-first = Richard
| title = American Fiction: New Readings
| publisher = Vision Press
| location = London
| year = 1983
| pages = 222–237
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Reston
| first = James
| title = Everyone is a Loser
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 23 October 1967
| page = 1
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite news
| last = Roberts
| first = Gene
| title = Wallace Derides War Protesters
| newspaper = The New York Times
| date = 29 October 1967
| page = 45
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Schueller
| first = Malini Johar
| title = The Politics of Voice: Liberalism and Social Criticism from Franklin to Kingston
| publisher = State University of New York Press
| location = Albany
| year = 1992
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Scott
| first = Nathan A.
| title = Three American Moralists: Mailer, Bellow, Trilling
| publisher = U of Notre Dame P
| location = Notre Dame
| year = 1973
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Small
| first = Melvin
| title = Covering Dissent: The Media and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement
| publisher = Rutgers UP
| location = New Brunswick
| year = 1994
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Streitmatter
| first = Rodger
| title = Mightier Than the Sword: How the News Media Have Shaped American History
| publisher = Westview
| location = Boulder
| year = 1997
| ref = harv
}}
* ———. {{cite book
| author =
| title = Voices of Revolution: The Dissident Press in America
| publisher = Columbia UP
| location = New York
| year = 2001
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite magazine
| last = Trachtenberg
| first = Alan
| title = Mailer on the Steps of the Pentagon
| magazine = The Nation
| date = 27 May 1968
| pages = 701–702
| ref = harv
}}
* {{cite book
| last = Wells
| first = Tom
| title = The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam
| publisher = U of California P
| location = Berkeley
| year = 1994
| ref = harv
}}

{{Refend}}

User:Chelsey.brantley/sandbox

2025-04-19T04:20:27Z

Chelsey.brantley: Added more citations

User:Chelsey.brantley/sandbox

2025-04-19T04:04:41Z

Chelsey.brantley: Added another citation

User:Chelsey.brantley/sandbox

2025-04-19T03:42:11Z

Chelsey.brantley: Added more citations

User:Chelsey.brantley/sandbox

2025-04-19T03:36:22Z

Chelsey.brantley: /* Works Cited */ Added more citations

User:Chelsey.brantley/sandbox

2025-04-19T03:21:55Z

Chelsey.brantley: Added citation to Works Cited

User:Chelsey.brantley/sandbox

2025-04-19T02:55:01Z

Chelsey.brantley: Added byline for new article I'm remediating

Talk:The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010

2025-04-13T14:34:53Z

Chelsey.brantley: Claimed another article (Westaway)

===Article Assignments, Vol. 4===
You will need to request an article and user name for {{PM}}. You may click the link to your article below to begin your edits. Status indicators: {{tick}} = complete (ready for final edits and banner removal); {{yellow tick}} = in process; {{cross}} = not started.

{| class="wikitable sortable" style="width: 100%;"
|-
! Author !! Article !! Editor !! Status
|-
| Mailer || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Postscript to the Fourth Advertisement for Myself|Postscript to the Fourth Advertisement for Myself]] || [[User:Grlucas]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Mailer || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Hemingway Revisited|Hemingway Revisited]] || [[User:Grlucas]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Lennon || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Hemingway to Mailer — A Delayed Response to The Deer Park|Hemingway to Mailer]] || [[User:Hobbitonya]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Hemingway || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norman, Ernest, and Greg|Norman, Ernest, and Greg]] || [[User:Grlucas]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Begiebing || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Ernest and Norman: A Dialogue in Two Acts|Ernest and Norman]] || [[User:DSánchez]] || {{cross}}
|-
| Bufithis & Curnutt || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/A Dialogue Essay on Mailer and Hemingway|A Dialogue Essay on Mailer and Hemingway]] || [[User:Grlucas]] || {{yellow tick}}
|-
| Meredith || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/The American Civil War in The Naked and the Dead and Across the River and Into the Trees|The American Civil War]] || [[User:KaraCroissant]] || {{cross}}
|-
| Shuman || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norman vs. Ernest: Influence and Identity|Norman vs. Ernest]] || [[User:MSeleb]] || {{cross}}
|-
| Lowenburg || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Hooking Off the Jab: Norman Mailer, Ernest Hemingway and Boxing|Hooking Off the Jab]] || [[User:ASpeed]] || {{cross}}
|-
| Cirino || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norman Mailer's The Fight: Hemingway, Bullfighting, and the Lovely Metaphysics of Boxing|Norman Mailer's ''The Fight'']] || [[User:TWietstruk]] || {{cross}}
|-
| Boddy || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing|Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing]] || [[User:JBrown]] || {{cross}}
|-
| Leeds || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Firearms in the Works of Hemingway and Mailer|Firearms in the Works of Hemingway and Mailer]] || [[User:CVinson]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Plath || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Jive-Ass Aficionado: Why Are We in Vietnam? and Hemingway's Moral Code|Jive-Ass Aficionado]] || [[User:ADear]] || {{cross}}
|-
| Cappell || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Hemingway's Jewish Progeny: Roth and Goldstein in ''The Naked and the Dead''|Hemingway's Jewish Progeny]] || [[User:THarris]] || {{cross}}
|-
| Peppard || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and the “Reds”|Mailer, Hemingway, and the “Reds”]] || [[User:KWatson]] || {{cross}}
|-
| Kaufmann || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Ernest and Norman (Exit Music)|Ernest and Norman (Exit Music)]] || [[User:Flowersbloom]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Justice || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself|Authorship and Alienation]] || [[User:APKnight25]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Josephs || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer's "Footnote to Death in the Afternoon"|Mailer's "Footnote to Death in the Afternoon"]] || [[User:KForeman]] || {{cross}}
|-
| Hays || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Battles for Regard, Writerly and Otherwise|Battles for Regard]] || [[User:ALedezma]] || {{cross}}
|-
| Gladstein || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norman, Papa, and the Autoerotic Construction of Woman|Norman, Papa, and the Autoerotic Construction of Woman]] || [[User:ALedezma]] || {{cross}}
|-
| Batchelor || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Looking at the Past: Nostalgia as Technique in The Naked and the Dead and For Whom the Bell Tolls|Looking at the Past]] || [[User:DBond007]] || {{yellow tick}}
|-
| Robinson || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead|Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures]] ||[[User:Priley1984]] || {{cross}}
|-
| Sanders || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing|Death, Art, and the Disturbing]] || [[User:JBawlson]] || {{cross}}
|-
| Stoneback || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/"Oohh Normie — You're Sooo Hemingway": Mailer Memories and Encounters|Mailer Memories and Encounters]] || [[User:Tbara4554]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Gordon || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Encounters with Mailer|Encounters with Mailer]] || [[User:Priley1984]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Vince || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer|Rumors of Grace]] || [[User:Sherrilledwards]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Apple || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Inside Norman Mailer|Inside Norman Mailer]] || [[User:Chelsey.brantley]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Sinclair || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norman Mailer: An Expected Encounter in an Unexpected Place|An Expected Encounter]] || [[User:Wverna]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Klavan || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/On Reading Mailer Too Young|On Reading Mailer Too Young]] || [[User:Essence903m]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Miele || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/What Norman Mailer Taught Me about Combat|What Norman Mailer Taught Me about Combat]] || [[User:TBorel]] || {{cross}}
|-
| Vernon || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches|Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches]] || ? || {{cross}}
|-
| Hooker || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norman Mailer: From Orgone Accumulator to Cancer Protection for Schizophrenics|From Orgone Accumulator to Cancer Protection for Schizophrenics]] || [[User:JKilchenmann]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Hinton || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Advertisements for Others: The Blurbs of Norman Mailer|Advertisements for Others]] || ? || {{cross}}
|-
| Hicks || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Harlot's Ghost, Bildungsroman, Masculinity and Hemingway|''Harlot’s Ghost'', ''Bildungsroman'', Masculinity and Hemingway]] || [[User:JKilchenmann]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Mercer || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Automatons and the Atomic Abyss: The Naked and the Dead|Automatons and the Atomic Abyss]] || [[User:MerAtticus]] || {{cross}}
|-
| Westaway || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/“A Noble Pursuit”: The Armies of the Night as Outside Agitator|“A Noble Pursuit”]] || [[User:Chelsey.brantley]] || {{yellow tick}}
|-
| Fox || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norris Church Mailer|Norris Church Mailer]] || [[User:Kamyers]] || {{tick}}
|}

User talk:Grlucas

2025-04-07T22:09:36Z

Chelsey.brantley: /* Remediation of "Inside Norman Mailer */ new section

{{Talk header}}
[[/Archive 202504/]]

== Final edits ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished remediating my assigned article. Please review it at your earliest convenience. The link is here: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer's_Mythmaking_in_An_American_Dream_and_“The_White_Negro”|Norman Mailer's Mythmaking in An American Dream and “The White Negro”]]—[[User:Erhernandez|Erhernandez]] ([[User talk:Erhernandez|talk]]) 08:52, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Erhernandez}} well done! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. I removed your banner after making a few corrections. Please have a look over it and move on to the next thing. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:06, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I transferred and edited my article. Can you look at it and remove the banner? Here's the link: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Authorship_and_Alienation_in_Death_in_the_Afternoon_and_Advertisements_for_Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself]] ( [[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 13:02, 28 March 2025 (EDT) )
:{{Reply to| APKnight25}} looking good! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. Next, eliminate all "fang" quotes in the article and add “real quotation marks.” Your sources should be a bulleted list. And there should be no space before a citation. You’re almost finished! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:21, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Reinventing the Wheel" Mailer Article for Review ==

Dr. Lucas,

My [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Reinventing_a_New_Wheel:_The_Films_of_Norman_Mailer|article]] is ready for review.

Thank you!
[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 15:29, 29 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|TPoole}} great! Could you include a link to it? Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:07, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
::OK, I [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer|found it]]. Looking really good. Great work. There are some citation issues that need to be seen to. The two red categories at the bottom should not be there; they will go away when the citations errors are corrected. Eliminate any quotation mark "fangs" in the text and replace them with “real quotation marks.” Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:14, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:::@Grlucas, what are the citation issues? Which ones need correcting? [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 17:31, 31 March 2025 (EDT)
::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} When you click your citations, they should jump to the works cited entry they correspond to. Several of yours do not, indicated by the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” at the bottom. You also have a "CS1 maint: Unrecognized language" error that will likely be cleared up when you fix the citation issues. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:55, 1 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::@Grlucas, I have tried correcting the sfn codes in my citations. I was able to get the 2 web citations to link correctly. But for some reason, I cannot get the Mailer 1967 film Wild 90 citation to link to the reference list. Please advise. [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 20:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
::::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} OK, all fixed and published. Thanks. Please move on to another remediation. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:46, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of: "Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of 'Totalitarianism'" ==

Dr. Lucas

I finished the remediation of the following article:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Contradictory_Syntheses:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Left_Conservatism_and_the_Problematic_of_%E2%80%9CTotalitarianism%E2%80%9D

It is ready for your review. Thank you.
[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 19:04, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} looks great. I made some tweaks to the references and some throughout, like changing ' and " to real apostrophes and quotation marks. A bit more clean-up, but you might want to check over it again. I removed the under-construction banner. Well one. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 21:32, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edit ==

Thank you for your comments on my remediation of
"[[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself.]]"

I've eliminated the "fang quotes" and changed them to “real quotation marks.” This was a very fascinating tip that taught me something new. It's something I've never noticed before but now always will.

I also put my sources in a bulleted list and removed the space before the citations. I think I'm all set now.
:{{Reply to|APKnight25}} great work! Please help other editors to complete the volume. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:34, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Firearms in the Works of Hemingway and Mailer'' ==

[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]

Hi Dr. Lucas,

I believe I have done everything for the Remediation of my article. Please let me know if there is anything else I need to do.

I will also link the article below:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Firearms_in_the_Works_of_Hemingway_and_Mailer

Thank you,
Caitlin Vinson
:{{Reply to|CVinson}} great work so far. Your references must use templates, please. Blockquotes must also be done correctly. No spaces or line breaks before or after the {{tl|pg}} template. Footnote placement is also off (punctuation goes before the footnote; no spaces before or after the footnote). I will add the abstract and url. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:30, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Hi Dr. Lucas, I believe there have been some updates made to the project. I believe I have also updated the works cited section to show correct templates. Please let me know if there is anything further that I need to do. Thank you, Caitlin.

== Remediation for ''Norman Mailer Today'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up my remediation article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Norman Mailer Today|Norman Mailer Today]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 18:20, 3 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Kamyers}} Great work! Please help your fellow editors finish the volume, or pick something to work on in [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010|Volume 4]]. Thanks, and well done. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:00, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of “The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’” ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished my remediation of Jennifer Yirinec's article: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”|The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.”]] Thank you for your assistance with the article. It is ready for its final review! [[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 10:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} a stellar job. Well done. I removed the banner, so you can move on to another article. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:12, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediations ==
Dr. Lucas, I have begun work on the tributes for volume 5. [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Grace Notes|Grace Notes]] by Stephen Borkowski is ready for its final review.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 12:58, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} Well done! Banner removed, url added. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:18, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

==Oohh Normie Final Edits==
Hi Dr. Lucas, I have finished my article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/"Oohh_Normie_—_You're_Sooo_Hemingway":_Mailer_Memories_and_Encounters|Oohh Normie, You're Sooo Hemingway]]. Please let me know if there is anything I need to fix. [[User:Tbara4554|Tbara4554]] ([[User talk:Tbara4554|talk]]) 20:01, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Tbara4554}} thank you. I made some corrections and removed the banner. You might want to have another look over it. Please move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:53, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Harlot's Ghost, Bildungsroman, Masculinity and Hemingway ==

Dr. Lucas,

The following article is ready for your review. Thanks.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Harlot%27s_Ghost,_Bildungsroman,_Masculinity_and_Hemingway

[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 21:22, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} excellent. Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:39, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== I am done with this ==

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Situating_Hemingway:_Mailer,_Style,_Ethics
:Received. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:29, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Review PM Article ==

Hi Dr. Lucas, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Hemingway_to_Mailer_—_A_Delayed_Response_to_The_Deer_Park|here]] is my remediated article, ready for review![[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 12:21, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Hobbitonya}} great work. I have removed the banner, so you are good to move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:20, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Project ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have finished my remedidation project and I am ready for it to be reviewed. '''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe]

Thanks,

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 13:04, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} good work so far. Please remove wikilinks. Change ' and " to typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. And all red errors at the bottom of the page need to be taken care of. These are likely all from coding errors in your sources. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:24, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Submission ==

Hello!
Here's my remediated article; [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/The_Devil's_Party:_Reading_and_Wreaking_Vengeance_in_The_Castle_in_the_Forest|The Devil's Party: Reading and Wreaking Vengeance in ''The Castle in the Forest'']].
Thanks! Please let me know if there's anything I can review or correct.
[[User:Maggiemrogers|Maggiemrogers]] ([[User talk:Maggiemrogers|talk]]) 13:23, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Maggiemrogers}} nice work! Banner removed, so please move on to something else in the volume. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:39, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Vol. 4: Rumors of Grace article remediated ==

I believe I have completed remediation of ''[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Rumors_of_Grace:_God-Language_in_Hemingway_and_Mailer|Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer]]'', vol. 4. I was having last-minute trouble with sfn errors for sources without authors, but Justin Kilchenmann helped me out, so I think they are fixed.

== Remediation of "Inside Norman Mailer ==

Hi Dr. Lucas - I have finished remediating the article, [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Inside Norman Mailer|Inside Norman Mailer]]. Please let me know if I need to make any adjustments. Thank you! [[User:Chelsey.brantley|Chelsey.brantley]] ([[User talk:Chelsey.brantley|talk]]) 18:09, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Inside Norman Mailer

2025-04-07T22:04:04Z

Chelsey.brantley: Corrected Category

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR04}}
{{Working}} 

{{Byline|last=Apple|first=Max|note=Reprinted by permission of the author, Max Apple. From {{cite book |last= |first= |date= |title=The Oranging of America |url= |location=New York |publisher=Viking |year=1976 |pages=49-60 |ref=harv }}|url=....}}

==I==
So what if I could kick the shit out of Truman Capote, and who really cares that once in a Newark bar, unknown to each other, I sprained the wrist of E. L. Doctorow in a harmless arm wrestle. For years I’ve kicked around in out-of-the-way places, sparred for a few bucks or just for kicks with the likes of Scrap Iron Johnson, Phil Rahv, Kenny Burke, and Chico Vejar. But, you know, I’m getting older too. When I feel the quick arthritic pains fly through my knuckles, I ask myself, Where are your poems and novels? Where are your long-limbed girls with cunts like tangerines? Yes, I’ve had a few successes. There are towns in America where people recognize me on the street and ask what I’m up to these days. ‘’I’m thirty-three,” I tell them, “in the top of my form. I’m up to the best. I’m up to Norman Mailer.”

They think I’m kidding, but the history of our game is speckled with the
unlikely. Look at Pete Rademacher—not even a pro. Fresh from a three-round Olympic decision, he got a shot at Floyd Patterson, made the cover of
''Sports Illustrated'', picked up an easy hundred grand. Now that is one fight
that Mr. Mailer, the Iiterary lion, chose not to discuss. The clash between
pro and amateur didn’t grab his imagination like two spades in Africa or the
dark passion of Emile Griffith. Yes, you know how to pick your spots, Norman. I who have studied your moves think that your best instinct is judgment. It’s your secret punch. You knew how to stake out Kennedy and
Goldwater, but on the whole you kept arm’s length from Nixon. Humphrey
never earned you a dime.

Ali, the moon, scrappy broads, dirty walls, all meat to you, slugger. But {{pg|504|505}} even Norman Mailer has misplayed a few. Remember the Chassidic tales? The rabbi pose was one you couldn’t quite pull off, but you cut your losses fast, the mark of a real pro, and I fully expect that you’ll come back to that one yet to cash in big on theology. Maybe at sixty you’ll throw a birthday party for yourself in the Jerusalem Hilton. You’ll roll up in an ancient scroll, grow earlocks, and say, “This is the big one, the one I’ve been waiting for.” With Allen Ginsberg along on a leash you’ll clank through the holy cities living on nuts and distilled water and sell your films as a legitimate appendix to the New Testament.

If I had the patience I’d wait for that religious revival and be your Boswell, then I’d drive off that whole crew of trainers and seconds who tag after you, but by then I’ll be almost fifty and maybe too slow to do you justice. As the rabbis said: “Reputation is a meal, energy a food stamp.” It’s ''toches affen tisch'', you understand that, big boy? I’m spotting you seventy pounds, a dozen books, wives, children, memories, millions in the bank. My weapons are desperation, neglect, and bad form. I am the C student in a mediocre college, the madman in the crowd, the quaint gunman who rides into Dodge City because he’s heard they have good restaurants. We share only a mutual desire to let it all take place in public, in the open. This is the way Mailer has always played it, this I learned from you. Why envy from afar when I can pummel you in a lighted ring. Your reputation makes it possible. You who are composed of genes and risks, you appreciate the wildness of strangers. Anyway, you think you’ll nail me in one.

While I, for months, have been running fifteen miles a day and eating
natural food, you train by scratching your nuts with a soft rubber eraser. You take walks in the moonlight and turn the clichés inside out. For you they make way. Sidewalks tilt, lovers quarrel. People whisper your name to each other, give you wholesale prices and numerous gifts. An “Okay” from Norman Mailer makes a career. Power like this there has not been since Catullus in old Rome carried on his instep Caesar’s daughter.

I’ll give you this much: you have come by it honestly. Not by bribery and not by marriage, not by family ties and not by wealth, not by good luck alone or by the breaks of the game. You have plenty, Slugger, that I’ll admit. But I do not come at you like a barbarian. The latest technology is in my corner. The Schick 1000-watt blow-dryer, trunks by Haspel, robe by Mr. Mann, Jovan cologne. Adidas kidskin shoes travel three quarters of my shin with laces of mandarin silk. From my flesh, coated with Vaseline and Desenex, {{pg|505|506}} the sweat breaks forth like pearls. My desperation grows muscular in the bright lights. I am the fatted calf.

You stand in your corner like Walt Whitman. No electric outlets, cheap
cotton YMCA trunks, even your gloves look used. Your red robe just says “Norm.” You wear sneakers and no socks. I should take you the Oriental way by working your feet up to blisters and then stepping on your toes, but I lack the Chinaman’s patience. No, it will have to be head to head, although everyone has cautioned me about trading punches with you.

Last week a crowd of critics came out to my camp in a chartered bus.
They carried canes and magnifying glasses. They told me to evaluate each
punch from the shoulder. “Let your elbow be the judge,” Robert Penn Warren said; “Sting like an irony,” from Booth of Chicago. They told me that if I win I’ll get an honorary degree from Kenyon and a job at one of the best gyms in the Midwest. Like a Greek chorus they stood beside my training ring and sang in unison, “Don’t slug it out, move and think. Speed and reflexes beat out power. To the victor goes the victory.”

“Scram.” I yelled, spitting my between-the-rounds mouthwash. “Get lost you crummy bastards. You shit on my poems and laughed off my stories,
now you want some of my body language. Go study the ambiguities of
Harold Robbins.” I was mad as hell but they stood firm taking notes on my weight and reach. Finally a group of kids carrying “Free Rubin Carter” signs ran them back to the bus.

The press is no help either. They are so tired of promoting Ali against a bunch of nobodies that to them I’m just another Joe Bugner. They rarely call me by name. “Mailer’s latest victim to be” is their tag. The ''Times'' calls me a “man with little to recommend him. Slight. almost feline, with the gestures of a minor poet, this latest in a long series of Mailer baiters seems to have no more business in the ring with the master than Stan Ketchel had with Jack Johnson.No one is interested in this fight. The Astrodome will be bare, UHF refuses to televise, and Mailer has scheduled a reading for later that night at the University of Houston. Norman, why do you keep accepting every challenge from the peanut gallery? Let’s stop this Christians versus Lions until there is a real contender. Now, if the Pynchon backers could come up with a site and a solid guarantee, that might be a real match.”

You know what I say, I say, “Fuck the ''Times''.” They gave Clay no chance
against Big Bad Sonny Liston, and four years later the “meanest, toughest” {{pg|506|507}} champ the ''Times'' ever saw dropped dead while tying his shoes and Muhammad built a Temple for Elijah M. So much for the sports writers.

But there are a few people who understand. Teddy White will be in my corner and Senator Proxmire at ringside. ''The Realist'' and the L.A. ''Free Press'' have picked me. The DAR sent a fruit basket. Outside the literary crowd I’m actually well liked. Cesar Chavez and the migrants from South Texas are coming up to cheer for me and my friend Ira from Minneapolis and the whole English department of my school. All the Democratic Presidential candidates sent telegrams; so did Bill Buckley, Mayor Beame, Gore Vidal, Irving Wallace, John Ehrlichman, and Herman Kahn. . . . All I can say is, when the time comes boys, I’ll be ready, just watch.

==II==
Our first face-to-face meeting is at the weigh-in. He wanted to dispense with it and turn in a morning urine specimen instead. The boxing commission
put the nix on that idea. Oh, he knew who I was before the weigh-in. We had traded photos, autographs, and once I had anthologized him.
But face to face on either side of a big metal scale with our robes on and Teddy White rubbing my back while I stare bullets, that is something else
again.

He nods, I look away. He can afford to be gracious. If I win, I’ll make a
handsome donation to UNICEF in his honor. For now, I button my lip. He
chats with White about convention sites, claims that because of tonight he’ll have an insider’s if they do the ’76 one in the Astrodome.

I come in at one hundred forty-four and three quarters, thirty-four-inch reach. He is two hundred fourteen and a thirty-inch reach. He spots me the reach and eighteen years. I give him seventy pounds and a ton of reputation. He has enough grace under pressure to teach at a ballet school, but the smile discloses bad teeth. I’ll remember that. His body hairs are graying. I can see that he has not trained and could use sleep. My tongue lies at the bottom of my mouth. “Good luck, kid,” he says, but I have removed my contact lenses and only learn later that it was the Great One in a magnanimous gesture whom I snubbed because I had to take a leak.

==III==
The Dome is a half-empty cave. At the last minute they lowered all tickets to a buck, and thousands popped in to see the King. To me the crowd means {{pg|507|508}} nothing. It is as anonymous as the whir of an air conditioner. I stare at the
Everlast trademark on my gloves and practice keeping the mouthpiece in
without gagging. “Stay loose,” Teddy yells over the din, “stay loose as a goose
and box like a fox.”

I dance in my corner for three or four minutes before he appears. The crowd goes wild when that woolly head jogs up the ramp. He climbs through the ropes and goes to center ring. He throws kisses with both open gloves. He
is wearing the same YMCA trunks and cheap sneakers, but his robe is a threadbare terrycloth without a name. It looks like something he picked up at Goodwill on the way over. The crowd loves his slovenliness.

“To each his own,” I whisper to myself as I ask Teddy for a final hit with the blow-dryer. My curls are tight as iron; his hang like eggshells crowding around his ears. He throws a kiss to me; I try to return it with the finger but my glove makes it a hand.

The referee motions us to center ring. We both requested Ruby Goldstein
but the old pro wouldn’t come out of retirement for a match like this one. I then asked for the Brown Bomber and Mailer wanted Jersey Joe. Finally we compromised on Archie Moore, who has a goatee now and is wearing a yellow leisure suit as he calls us together for a review of the rules. I notice that he is wearing street shoes and think to protest, but I see that he needs the black patent pumps in order to make his trousers break at the step. A good sign, I think. Archie will be with me.

He goes over the mandatory eight count and the three-knockdown rule,
but Mailer and I ignore the words. Our eyes meet and mine are ready for
his. For countless hours I have trained before a mirror with his snapshot taped to the middle. I have had blown up to poster size that old ''Esquire'' pose of him in the ring, and I am ready for what I know will be the first real encounter. My eyes are steady on his. In the first few seconds I see boredom, I see sweet brown eyes that would open into yawning mouthlike cavities if they could. I see indifferent eyes and gay youthful glances. Checkbook eyes. Evelyn Wood eyes. Then suddenly he blinks and I have my first triumph. Fear pops out. Plain old unabashed fear. Not trembling, not panic, just a little fear. And I’ve found it in the eyes, exactly like the nineteenth-century writers used to before Mailer switched it to the asshole. I smile and he knows that I know. Anger replaces the fear but the edge is mine, big boy. All the sportswriters and oddsmakers haven’t lulled you. You know that every time you step into the ring it’s like going to the {{pg|508|509}} doctor with a slight cough that with a little twist of the DNA turns out to
be cancer. You, old cancermonger, you know this better than anyone. In
my small frame, in my gleaming slightly feline gestures you have smelled
the blood test, the chest x-ray, the specialist, the lies, the operations, the false hopes, the statistics. Yes, Norman, you looked at me or through me and in some distant future that maybe I carry in my hands like a telegram, there you glimpsed that old bugaboo and it went straight to your prostate, to your bladder, and to your heavy fingertips. In a second, Norm, you built me up. Oh, I have grown big on your fear. Giant killers have to so that they can reach up for the fatal stab to the heart.

No camera has recorded this. Nor has Archie Moore repeating his memorized monologue noted our exchange. Only you and I, Norm, understand.
This is as it should be. You have given dignity to my challenge; like a sovereign government you have recognized my hopeless revolutionary state
and turned me, in a blink, credible, at least to you, at least where it counts. I slap my fists together and at the bell I meet you for the first time as an equal.

==IV==
The problem now is as old as realism. You don’t want all the grunts, the
shortness of breath, the sound of leather on skin, and I don’t want to tell you in great detail. But it’s all there, the throwing of punches, the clinches, the head butting, the swelling of injured faces. If I forget to, then you put it in. For I am too busy taking the measure of my opponent to feel the slap of his glove against my flesh. The bell has moved us into a new field of force. We drop our pens. The spotlight is the glare of eternity, and what it has all come to is simply the matter of Truth. “Existentialist” I call him, spitting out my mouthpiece, though in practice I have recited Peter Piper a dozen times and kept the mouthpiece in. “Dated existentialist. Insincere existentialist.
Jewish existentialist . . . ” I hit him with this smooth combination, but he continues to rush me bearlike, serene, full of skill and power.

“Campy lightweight,” he yells, in full charge as I sidestep his rush and he
tangles his upper body in the ropes.

I come up behind, and as well as I can with the gross movement of the
glove I pull back his head and expose the blue gnarled cacophony of his neck.

“I am Abraham and you the ram caught in the thicket,” I announce from behind. “I have been an outcast in many lands, I bear the covenant, and you {{pg|509|510}} full of power and goatish lust, you carry the false demon out of whose curved horn I will blow my own triumph and salvation.”

“How unlike an Abraham thou art,” he responds, gasping from his entanglement in the ropes. “Where is thy son then and where thy handmaiden Hagar, whom thou so ungenerously got with a child of false promise and then discarded into the wilderness? Thou art an assumer of historical identities, a chameleon of literary pretension.”

I reach into the empty air for the sword of slaughter when Archie Moore separates us, rights Mailer, and warns me about hair pulling and exposing the
jugular of my opponent.

Now we stalk one another at center ring. He, not having trained, not having rested, not having regarded my challenge as serious, he is ready almost at once to revert to instinctive behavior. He wants it all animal now and tries
to bite off his glove so that he can come atme with ten fingers. But I am still in the airy realms of the mind. I see and discern his actions. How coarse appears the Mailer saliva upon his worn gloves, how disgusting his tongue and
crooked teeth as they nibble at the strings. His mouth has become as a loom with the glove lace moving between his teeth on the slow, feeble power of his
tongue.

“The Industrial Revolution,” I yell across the ring, and his gloves drop, his mouth is open and agape. I land a hard right to his jaw and feel the ligaments stretch. At the bell he is dazed and hurt. He moves to his corner like an old man in an unemployment line.

I stand in the middle of the ring and watch the slow shuffle toward comfort of this man whom most enlightened folks thought I could not withstand for even three minutes. So carefully have I trained, so honest has been
my fifteen miles of daily roadwork that the first round of exertion has
scarcely left me breathless. While Norman is in his corner swishing his
mouth, having his brow mopped, I am in mid-ring, stunned with my opening achievement. I have stayed a full round with him. I have seen the fear in his eyes and the beast in his soul. I have felt the heft of his sweating form in a heavy embrace. In the clinch, as our protective cups clicked against each other, there have I surmised his lust. For three metaphysical moments we two white men have embraced in violence while old black Archie pares his perfect fingernails in the midst of us.

“Don’t forget the game plan,” Teddy is yelling from my corner. He wants
my help in pulling the blackboard through the ropes. I come out of my {{pg|510|511}}reverie to help him. Oh, I have been waiting for this moment, and now but
for good old Teddy I might have forgotten. Like the most careful teacher printing large block letters for an eager second grade, I inscribe and turn to four sides so all can see, “The Naked and the Dead Is His Best Work.”

When Norman reads my inscription, he is swishing Gatorade in his
mouth while his second, Richard Poirier, applies with a Q-tip glycerine and rosewater to the Mailer lips. When my barb registers, he swallows the
Gatorade and bites the Q-tip in half. Poirier and José Torres can barely keep
him on his stool. They whisper frantically, each in an ear. Archie is across the ring getting a quick shine from a boy who manages, on tiptoe, to reach
with his buffing cloth up to the apron of the elevated ring. Arch kneels to tip
with an autograph.

When the bell tolls round two, I face a Mailer who has with herculean effort
quickly calmed himself. He has sucked in his cheeks for control and
looks, for the moment, like a tubercular housewife. I see immediately that he
has beaten back the demiurge. We will stay in the realms of the intellect. His
gloves are completely laced and his steps are tight and full of control. He dances over to the ropes and beckons me with an open glove to taste his
newness.

Who do you think I am, Norm? Didn’t I travel half a world with no hope
of writing a book about it to watch Ali lure George Foreman to the ropes? Not for me, Norm, is your coy ease along the top strand. I’ll wait and take you in the open. You see, I learned more than you did in Africa. While you holed up in an air-conditioned hotel and resurrected those eight rounds for your half a million advance, I thumbed my way to what was once called Biafra. I went to the cemetery where Dick Tiger lies dead of causes unknown at age thirty-five in newly prosperous Nigeria. How did you miss Dick Tiger? You who were the first white negro, you the crown prince of nigger-lovers, you missed the ace of the jungle. Yes, he was the heart of the dark continent, the Aristotle of Africa. A middleweight and a revolutionary. While you clowned around with Torres and Ali and Emile Griffith, Tiger packed his gear and headed home to see what he could pick clean from the starvation and the slaughter. He went home to face bad times and bad people and was dead a week after his plane touched down. Where were you and the sportswriters, Norm, when Dick Tiger needed you? I at least made the trek to the resting
place of the hero, and it was there in the holy calm of his forgotten tomb that I vowed to come back and make my move. No one offered me a penny {{pg|511|512}} for “The Dick Tiger Story” as told to me, so you won’t get it now either. Come out to the middle, Norm. No, you’re still coy, relaxed; well, two can play that
one.

I sit down in the corner opposite him; I fan myself with the mouthpiece.
To the audience it looks as if we’re kidding. He sloping against the ropes, I twenty-five feet away pretending I’m at a picnic in the English countryside. Real fight fans know what’s up. There is only a certain amount of available energy. In the universe it’s called entropy; in the ring it is known as “ppf,” punches per flurry. Neither of us has the strength at this moment to muster the necessary ten to twelve ppf’s to really damage the other. Fighters trained in the Golden Gloves or various homes for juvenile delinquents will go through the motions anyway. They will stalk and butt and sweat upon each other. But Mailer and I, knowing the score, wait out the round. Archie Moore leafs through the Texas Boxing Commission rules. Some fans boo, others take advantage of the lull to refresh themselves.

For me, every second is a victory. Round by round I wear the laurel and the bay. Who thought I could even last the first? Five will get me tenure, seven and I’ll be a dean. Yes, I can wait, Norm, until you come to me in midring
with all that bulk and experience. Come to me with your strength, your
wisdom, your compassion, and your insight. This time at the bell we are
both giggling, aware each to each of the resined canvas upon which we paint our destinies.

I walk over to his corner where he sits on his stool, kingly again, not hurt as he was after round one. He offers me a drink from his green bottle. We spit into the same bucket. I know his seconds don’t like me coming over there between rounds. Poirier turns away but Norman smiles, cuffs me playfully behind the neck. Together we walk out to await the bell.

For twice three minutes we have traveled the same turf. Ambition and
gravity have held us in a dialectical encounter, but as round three begins, Mailer’s old friend the irrational joins us. No matter that I actually see the
pig-tailed form of my sister beckoning me between mouthfuls of popcorn to rush at you. Aeneas, Hector, Dick Tiger, they too saw the phantoms that promise the sunshine and delight after one quick lunge. My sister is nine years old. She wears a gingham dress. She is right there beside you, close
enough for Archie to stumble on.

“Watch out, kid,” I say, “you shouldn’t even be here.” “It’s okay,” Mailer says. “She has my permission.”{{pg|512|513}}
She throws the empty popcorn box over the ropes. “Please take me home,” she whimpers, and as she stands there the power enters me, the ppf quotient floods my own soul, and I rush, not in fear, not in anger, but in full sweet confidence, I rush with both fists to the middle of Norman Mailer.

First my left with all its quixotic force and then my sure and solid right lands in the valley of his solar plexus. Next my head in a raw, cruel butt joins
the piston arms. Hands, arms, head, neck, back, legs. As a boy for the first time shakes the high dive in the presence of his parents, with such pride do
I dive. And with the power of falling human weight knifing through the chlorine-dark pool do I catapult. As a surgeon lays open flesh, indifferently, thinking not of tumors but of the arc of his raquet in full backswing, with
such professional ease am I engulfed.

I hear the wind leave his lungs. Like large soft earlobes, they shade me from the glare of his heart. The sound of his digestive juices is rhythmic and
I resonate to the music of his inner organs. I hear the liver weakened from drink but on key still, the gentle reek of kidneys, the questioning solo of pancreas, the harmonicalike appendix, all here all around me, and the cautionary
voice of my mother: “Be careful, little one, when you hit someone so
hard in the stomach. That’s how Houdini died.”

Somewhere else Archie Moore is counting ten over a prone loser. Judges are packing up scorecards and handbags snap shut. I am comfortable in the
damp prison of his rib cage. His blood explodes like little Hiroshimas every second.

“Concentrate,” says Mailer, “so the experience will not be wasted on you.”

“It’s hard,” I say, “amid the color and distraction.”

“I know,” says my gentle master, “but think about one big thing.”

I concentrate on the new edition of the ''Encyclopedia Britannica''. It works. My mind is less a palimpsest, more a blank page.

“You may be too young to remember,” he says, “James Jones and James T. Farrell and James Gould Cozzens and dozens like them. I took them all on, absorbed all they had and went on my way, just like Shakespeare ate up
''Tottel’s Miscellany''.”

“No lectures,” I gasp, “only truths.”

“I am the Twentieth Century,” Mailer says. “Go forth from here toward the east and earn your bread by the sweat of your brow. Never write another line
nor raise a fist to any man.” His words and his music are like Christmas
morning. I go forth, a seer.

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Inside Norman Mailer}}
[[Category:Classic Interpretations (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Inside Norman Mailer

2025-04-07T21:56:04Z

Chelsey.brantley:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR04}}
{{Working}} 

{{Byline|last=Apple|first=Max|note=Reprinted by permission of the author, Max Apple. From {{cite book |last= |first= |date= |title=The Oranging of America |url= |location=New York |publisher=Viking |year=1976 |pages=49-60 |ref=harv }}|url=....}}

==I==
So what if I could kick the shit out of Truman Capote, and who really cares that once in a Newark bar, unknown to each other, I sprained the wrist of E. L. Doctorow in a harmless arm wrestle. For years I’ve kicked around in out-of-the-way places, sparred for a few bucks or just for kicks with the likes of Scrap Iron Johnson, Phil Rahv, Kenny Burke, and Chico Vejar. But, you know, I’m getting older too. When I feel the quick arthritic pains fly through my knuckles, I ask myself, Where are your poems and novels? Where are your long-limbed girls with cunts like tangerines? Yes, I’ve had a few successes. There are towns in America where people recognize me on the street and ask what I’m up to these days. ‘’I’m thirty-three,” I tell them, “in the top of my form. I’m up to the best. I’m up to Norman Mailer.”

They think I’m kidding, but the history of our game is speckled with the
unlikely. Look at Pete Rademacher—not even a pro. Fresh from a three-round Olympic decision, he got a shot at Floyd Patterson, made the cover of
''Sports Illustrated'', picked up an easy hundred grand. Now that is one fight
that Mr. Mailer, the Iiterary lion, chose not to discuss. The clash between
pro and amateur didn’t grab his imagination like two spades in Africa or the
dark passion of Emile Griffith. Yes, you know how to pick your spots, Norman. I who have studied your moves think that your best instinct is judgment. It’s your secret punch. You knew how to stake out Kennedy and
Goldwater, but on the whole you kept arm’s length from Nixon. Humphrey
never earned you a dime.

Ali, the moon, scrappy broads, dirty walls, all meat to you, slugger. But {{pg|504|505}} even Norman Mailer has misplayed a few. Remember the Chassidic tales? The rabbi pose was one you couldn’t quite pull off, but you cut your losses fast, the mark of a real pro, and I fully expect that you’ll come back to that one yet to cash in big on theology. Maybe at sixty you’ll throw a birthday party for yourself in the Jerusalem Hilton. You’ll roll up in an ancient scroll, grow earlocks, and say, “This is the big one, the one I’ve been waiting for.” With Allen Ginsberg along on a leash you’ll clank through the holy cities living on nuts and distilled water and sell your films as a legitimate appendix to the New Testament.

If I had the patience I’d wait for that religious revival and be your Boswell, then I’d drive off that whole crew of trainers and seconds who tag after you, but by then I’ll be almost fifty and maybe too slow to do you justice. As the rabbis said: “Reputation is a meal, energy a food stamp.” It’s ''toches affen tisch'', you understand that, big boy? I’m spotting you seventy pounds, a dozen books, wives, children, memories, millions in the bank. My weapons are desperation, neglect, and bad form. I am the C student in a mediocre college, the madman in the crowd, the quaint gunman who rides into Dodge City because he’s heard they have good restaurants. We share only a mutual desire to let it all take place in public, in the open. This is the way Mailer has always played it, this I learned from you. Why envy from afar when I can pummel you in a lighted ring. Your reputation makes it possible. You who are composed of genes and risks, you appreciate the wildness of strangers. Anyway, you think you’ll nail me in one.

While I, for months, have been running fifteen miles a day and eating
natural food, you train by scratching your nuts with a soft rubber eraser. You take walks in the moonlight and turn the clichés inside out. For you they make way. Sidewalks tilt, lovers quarrel. People whisper your name to each other, give you wholesale prices and numerous gifts. An “Okay” from Norman Mailer makes a career. Power like this there has not been since Catullus in old Rome carried on his instep Caesar’s daughter.

I’ll give you this much: you have come by it honestly. Not by bribery and not by marriage, not by family ties and not by wealth, not by good luck alone or by the breaks of the game. You have plenty, Slugger, that I’ll admit. But I do not come at you like a barbarian. The latest technology is in my corner. The Schick 1000-watt blow-dryer, trunks by Haspel, robe by Mr. Mann, Jovan cologne. Adidas kidskin shoes travel three quarters of my shin with laces of mandarin silk. From my flesh, coated with Vaseline and Desenex, {{pg|505|506}} the sweat breaks forth like pearls. My desperation grows muscular in the bright lights. I am the fatted calf.

You stand in your corner like Walt Whitman. No electric outlets, cheap
cotton YMCA trunks, even your gloves look used. Your red robe just says “Norm.” You wear sneakers and no socks. I should take you the Oriental way by working your feet up to blisters and then stepping on your toes, but I lack the Chinaman’s patience. No, it will have to be head to head, although everyone has cautioned me about trading punches with you.

Last week a crowd of critics came out to my camp in a chartered bus.
They carried canes and magnifying glasses. They told me to evaluate each
punch from the shoulder. “Let your elbow be the judge,” Robert Penn Warren said; “Sting like an irony,” from Booth of Chicago. They told me that if I win I’ll get an honorary degree from Kenyon and a job at one of the best gyms in the Midwest. Like a Greek chorus they stood beside my training ring and sang in unison, “Don’t slug it out, move and think. Speed and reflexes beat out power. To the victor goes the victory.”

“Scram.” I yelled, spitting my between-the-rounds mouthwash. “Get lost you crummy bastards. You shit on my poems and laughed off my stories,
now you want some of my body language. Go study the ambiguities of
Harold Robbins.” I was mad as hell but they stood firm taking notes on my weight and reach. Finally a group of kids carrying “Free Rubin Carter” signs ran them back to the bus.

The press is no help either. They are so tired of promoting Ali against a bunch of nobodies that to them I’m just another Joe Bugner. They rarely call me by name. “Mailer’s latest victim to be” is their tag. The ''Times'' calls me a “man with little to recommend him. Slight. almost feline, with the gestures of a minor poet, this latest in a long series of Mailer baiters seems to have no more business in the ring with the master than Stan Ketchel had with Jack Johnson.No one is interested in this fight. The Astrodome will be bare, UHF refuses to televise, and Mailer has scheduled a reading for later that night at the University of Houston. Norman, why do you keep accepting every challenge from the peanut gallery? Let’s stop this Christians versus Lions until there is a real contender. Now, if the Pynchon backers could come up with a site and a solid guarantee, that might be a real match.”

You know what I say, I say, “Fuck the ''Times''.” They gave Clay no chance
against Big Bad Sonny Liston, and four years later the “meanest, toughest” {{pg|506|507}} champ the ''Times'' ever saw dropped dead while tying his shoes and Muhammad built a Temple for Elijah M. So much for the sports writers.

But there are a few people who understand. Teddy White will be in my corner and Senator Proxmire at ringside. ''The Realist'' and the L.A. ''Free Press'' have picked me. The DAR sent a fruit basket. Outside the literary crowd I’m actually well liked. Cesar Chavez and the migrants from South Texas are coming up to cheer for me and my friend Ira from Minneapolis and the whole English department of my school. All the Democratic Presidential candidates sent telegrams; so did Bill Buckley, Mayor Beame, Gore Vidal, Irving Wallace, John Ehrlichman, and Herman Kahn. . . . All I can say is, when the time comes boys, I’ll be ready, just watch.

==II==
Our first face-to-face meeting is at the weigh-in. He wanted to dispense with it and turn in a morning urine specimen instead. The boxing commission
put the nix on that idea. Oh, he knew who I was before the weigh-in. We had traded photos, autographs, and once I had anthologized him.
But face to face on either side of a big metal scale with our robes on and Teddy White rubbing my back while I stare bullets, that is something else
again.

He nods, I look away. He can afford to be gracious. If I win, I’ll make a
handsome donation to UNICEF in his honor. For now, I button my lip. He
chats with White about convention sites, claims that because of tonight he’ll have an insider’s if they do the ’76 one in the Astrodome.

I come in at one hundred forty-four and three quarters, thirty-four-inch reach. He is two hundred fourteen and a thirty-inch reach. He spots me the reach and eighteen years. I give him seventy pounds and a ton of reputation. He has enough grace under pressure to teach at a ballet school, but the smile discloses bad teeth. I’ll remember that. His body hairs are graying. I can see that he has not trained and could use sleep. My tongue lies at the bottom of my mouth. “Good luck, kid,” he says, but I have removed my contact lenses and only learn later that it was the Great One in a magnanimous gesture whom I snubbed because I had to take a leak.

==III==
The Dome is a half-empty cave. At the last minute they lowered all tickets to a buck, and thousands popped in to see the King. To me the crowd means {{pg|507|508}} nothing. It is as anonymous as the whir of an air conditioner. I stare at the
Everlast trademark on my gloves and practice keeping the mouthpiece in
without gagging. “Stay loose,” Teddy yells over the din, “stay loose as a goose
and box like a fox.”

I dance in my corner for three or four minutes before he appears. The crowd goes wild when that woolly head jogs up the ramp. He climbs through the ropes and goes to center ring. He throws kisses with both open gloves. He
is wearing the same YMCA trunks and cheap sneakers, but his robe is a threadbare terrycloth without a name. It looks like something he picked up at Goodwill on the way over. The crowd loves his slovenliness.

“To each his own,” I whisper to myself as I ask Teddy for a final hit with the blow-dryer. My curls are tight as iron; his hang like eggshells crowding around his ears. He throws a kiss to me; I try to return it with the finger but my glove makes it a hand.

The referee motions us to center ring. We both requested Ruby Goldstein
but the old pro wouldn’t come out of retirement for a match like this one. I then asked for the Brown Bomber and Mailer wanted Jersey Joe. Finally we compromised on Archie Moore, who has a goatee now and is wearing a yellow leisure suit as he calls us together for a review of the rules. I notice that he is wearing street shoes and think to protest, but I see that he needs the black patent pumps in order to make his trousers break at the step. A good sign, I think. Archie will be with me.

He goes over the mandatory eight count and the three-knockdown rule,
but Mailer and I ignore the words. Our eyes meet and mine are ready for
his. For countless hours I have trained before a mirror with his snapshot taped to the middle. I have had blown up to poster size that old ''Esquire'' pose of him in the ring, and I am ready for what I know will be the first real encounter. My eyes are steady on his. In the first few seconds I see boredom, I see sweet brown eyes that would open into yawning mouthlike cavities if they could. I see indifferent eyes and gay youthful glances. Checkbook eyes. Evelyn Wood eyes. Then suddenly he blinks and I have my first triumph. Fear pops out. Plain old unabashed fear. Not trembling, not panic, just a little fear. And I’ve found it in the eyes, exactly like the nineteenth-century writers used to before Mailer switched it to the asshole. I smile and he knows that I know. Anger replaces the fear but the edge is mine, big boy. All the sportswriters and oddsmakers haven’t lulled you. You know that every time you step into the ring it’s like going to the {{pg|508|509}} doctor with a slight cough that with a little twist of the DNA turns out to
be cancer. You, old cancermonger, you know this better than anyone. In
my small frame, in my gleaming slightly feline gestures you have smelled
the blood test, the chest x-ray, the specialist, the lies, the operations, the false hopes, the statistics. Yes, Norman, you looked at me or through me and in some distant future that maybe I carry in my hands like a telegram, there you glimpsed that old bugaboo and it went straight to your prostate, to your bladder, and to your heavy fingertips. In a second, Norm, you built me up. Oh, I have grown big on your fear. Giant killers have to so that they can reach up for the fatal stab to the heart.

No camera has recorded this. Nor has Archie Moore repeating his memorized monologue noted our exchange. Only you and I, Norm, understand.
This is as it should be. You have given dignity to my challenge; like a sovereign government you have recognized my hopeless revolutionary state
and turned me, in a blink, credible, at least to you, at least where it counts. I slap my fists together and at the bell I meet you for the first time as an equal.

==IV==
The problem now is as old as realism. You don’t want all the grunts, the
shortness of breath, the sound of leather on skin, and I don’t want to tell you in great detail. But it’s all there, the throwing of punches, the clinches, the head butting, the swelling of injured faces. If I forget to, then you put it in. For I am too busy taking the measure of my opponent to feel the slap of his glove against my flesh. The bell has moved us into a new field of force. We drop our pens. The spotlight is the glare of eternity, and what it has all come to is simply the matter of Truth. “Existentialist” I call him, spitting out my mouthpiece, though in practice I have recited Peter Piper a dozen times and kept the mouthpiece in. “Dated existentialist. Insincere existentialist.
Jewish existentialist . . . ” I hit him with this smooth combination, but he continues to rush me bearlike, serene, full of skill and power.

“Campy lightweight,” he yells, in full charge as I sidestep his rush and he
tangles his upper body in the ropes.

I come up behind, and as well as I can with the gross movement of the
glove I pull back his head and expose the blue gnarled cacophony of his neck.

“I am Abraham and you the ram caught in the thicket,” I announce from behind. “I have been an outcast in many lands, I bear the covenant, and you {{pg|509|510}} full of power and goatish lust, you carry the false demon out of whose curved horn I will blow my own triumph and salvation.”

“How unlike an Abraham thou art,” he responds, gasping from his entanglement in the ropes. “Where is thy son then and where thy handmaiden Hagar, whom thou so ungenerously got with a child of false promise and then discarded into the wilderness? Thou art an assumer of historical identities, a chameleon of literary pretension.”

I reach into the empty air for the sword of slaughter when Archie Moore separates us, rights Mailer, and warns me about hair pulling and exposing the
jugular of my opponent.

Now we stalk one another at center ring. He, not having trained, not having rested, not having regarded my challenge as serious, he is ready almost at once to revert to instinctive behavior. He wants it all animal now and tries
to bite off his glove so that he can come atme with ten fingers. But I am still in the airy realms of the mind. I see and discern his actions. How coarse appears the Mailer saliva upon his worn gloves, how disgusting his tongue and
crooked teeth as they nibble at the strings. His mouth has become as a loom with the glove lace moving between his teeth on the slow, feeble power of his
tongue.

“The Industrial Revolution,” I yell across the ring, and his gloves drop, his mouth is open and agape. I land a hard right to his jaw and feel the ligaments stretch. At the bell he is dazed and hurt. He moves to his corner like an old man in an unemployment line.

I stand in the middle of the ring and watch the slow shuffle toward comfort of this man whom most enlightened folks thought I could not withstand for even three minutes. So carefully have I trained, so honest has been
my fifteen miles of daily roadwork that the first round of exertion has
scarcely left me breathless. While Norman is in his corner swishing his
mouth, having his brow mopped, I am in mid-ring, stunned with my opening achievement. I have stayed a full round with him. I have seen the fear in his eyes and the beast in his soul. I have felt the heft of his sweating form in a heavy embrace. In the clinch, as our protective cups clicked against each other, there have I surmised his lust. For three metaphysical moments we two white men have embraced in violence while old black Archie pares his perfect fingernails in the midst of us.

“Don’t forget the game plan,” Teddy is yelling from my corner. He wants
my help in pulling the blackboard through the ropes. I come out of my {{pg|510|511}}reverie to help him. Oh, I have been waiting for this moment, and now but
for good old Teddy I might have forgotten. Like the most careful teacher printing large block letters for an eager second grade, I inscribe and turn to four sides so all can see, “The Naked and the Dead Is His Best Work.”

When Norman reads my inscription, he is swishing Gatorade in his
mouth while his second, Richard Poirier, applies with a Q-tip glycerine and rosewater to the Mailer lips. When my barb registers, he swallows the
Gatorade and bites the Q-tip in half. Poirier and José Torres can barely keep
him on his stool. They whisper frantically, each in an ear. Archie is across the ring getting a quick shine from a boy who manages, on tiptoe, to reach
with his buffing cloth up to the apron of the elevated ring. Arch kneels to tip
with an autograph.

When the bell tolls round two, I face a Mailer who has with herculean effort
quickly calmed himself. He has sucked in his cheeks for control and
looks, for the moment, like a tubercular housewife. I see immediately that he
has beaten back the demiurge. We will stay in the realms of the intellect. His
gloves are completely laced and his steps are tight and full of control. He dances over to the ropes and beckons me with an open glove to taste his
newness.

Who do you think I am, Norm? Didn’t I travel half a world with no hope
of writing a book about it to watch Ali lure George Foreman to the ropes? Not for me, Norm, is your coy ease along the top strand. I’ll wait and take you in the open. You see, I learned more than you did in Africa. While you holed up in an air-conditioned hotel and resurrected those eight rounds for your half a million advance, I thumbed my way to what was once called Biafra. I went to the cemetery where Dick Tiger lies dead of causes unknown at age thirty-five in newly prosperous Nigeria. How did you miss Dick Tiger? You who were the first white negro, you the crown prince of nigger-lovers, you missed the ace of the jungle. Yes, he was the heart of the dark continent, the Aristotle of Africa. A middleweight and a revolutionary. While you clowned around with Torres and Ali and Emile Griffith, Tiger packed his gear and headed home to see what he could pick clean from the starvation and the slaughter. He went home to face bad times and bad people and was dead a week after his plane touched down. Where were you and the sportswriters, Norm, when Dick Tiger needed you? I at least made the trek to the resting
place of the hero, and it was there in the holy calm of his forgotten tomb that I vowed to come back and make my move. No one offered me a penny {{pg|511|512}} for “The Dick Tiger Story” as told to me, so you won’t get it now either. Come out to the middle, Norm. No, you’re still coy, relaxed; well, two can play that
one.

I sit down in the corner opposite him; I fan myself with the mouthpiece.
To the audience it looks as if we’re kidding. He sloping against the ropes, I twenty-five feet away pretending I’m at a picnic in the English countryside. Real fight fans know what’s up. There is only a certain amount of available energy. In the universe it’s called entropy; in the ring it is known as “ppf,” punches per flurry. Neither of us has the strength at this moment to muster the necessary ten to twelve ppf’s to really damage the other. Fighters trained in the Golden Gloves or various homes for juvenile delinquents will go through the motions anyway. They will stalk and butt and sweat upon each other. But Mailer and I, knowing the score, wait out the round. Archie Moore leafs through the Texas Boxing Commission rules. Some fans boo, others take advantage of the lull to refresh themselves.

For me, every second is a victory. Round by round I wear the laurel and the bay. Who thought I could even last the first? Five will get me tenure, seven and I’ll be a dean. Yes, I can wait, Norm, until you come to me in midring
with all that bulk and experience. Come to me with your strength, your
wisdom, your compassion, and your insight. This time at the bell we are
both giggling, aware each to each of the resined canvas upon which we paint our destinies.

I walk over to his corner where he sits on his stool, kingly again, not hurt as he was after round one. He offers me a drink from his green bottle. We spit into the same bucket. I know his seconds don’t like me coming over there between rounds. Poirier turns away but Norman smiles, cuffs me playfully behind the neck. Together we walk out to await the bell.

For twice three minutes we have traveled the same turf. Ambition and
gravity have held us in a dialectical encounter, but as round three begins, Mailer’s old friend the irrational joins us. No matter that I actually see the
pig-tailed form of my sister beckoning me between mouthfuls of popcorn to rush at you. Aeneas, Hector, Dick Tiger, they too saw the phantoms that promise the sunshine and delight after one quick lunge. My sister is nine years old. She wears a gingham dress. She is right there beside you, close
enough for Archie to stumble on.

“Watch out, kid,” I say, “you shouldn’t even be here.” “It’s okay,” Mailer says. “She has my permission.”{{pg|512|513}}
She throws the empty popcorn box over the ropes. “Please take me home,” she whimpers, and as she stands there the power enters me, the ppf quotient floods my own soul, and I rush, not in fear, not in anger, but in full sweet confidence, I rush with both fists to the middle of Norman Mailer.

First my left with all its quixotic force and then my sure and solid right lands in the valley of his solar plexus. Next my head in a raw, cruel butt joins
the piston arms. Hands, arms, head, neck, back, legs. As a boy for the first time shakes the high dive in the presence of his parents, with such pride do
I dive. And with the power of falling human weight knifing through the chlorine-dark pool do I catapult. As a surgeon lays open flesh, indifferently, thinking not of tumors but of the arc of his raquet in full backswing, with
such professional ease am I engulfed.

I hear the wind leave his lungs. Like large soft earlobes, they shade me from the glare of his heart. The sound of his digestive juices is rhythmic and
I resonate to the music of his inner organs. I hear the liver weakened from drink but on key still, the gentle reek of kidneys, the questioning solo of pancreas, the harmonicalike appendix, all here all around me, and the cautionary
voice of my mother: “Be careful, little one, when you hit someone so
hard in the stomach. That’s how Houdini died.”

Somewhere else Archie Moore is counting ten over a prone loser. Judges are packing up scorecards and handbags snap shut. I am comfortable in the
damp prison of his rib cage. His blood explodes like little Hiroshimas every second.

“Concentrate,” says Mailer, “so the experience will not be wasted on you.”

“It’s hard,” I say, “amid the color and distraction.”

“I know,” says my gentle master, “but think about one big thing.”

I concentrate on the new edition of the ''Encyclopedia Britannica''. It works. My mind is less a palimpsest, more a blank page.

“You may be too young to remember,” he says, “James Jones and James T. Farrell and James Gould Cozzens and dozens like them. I took them all on, absorbed all they had and went on my way, just like Shakespeare ate up
''Tottel’s Miscellany''.”

“No lectures,” I gasp, “only truths.”

“I am the Twentieth Century,” Mailer says. “Go forth from here toward the east and earn your bread by the sweat of your brow. Never write another line
nor raise a fist to any man.” His words and his music are like Christmas
morning. I go forth, a seer.
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Inside Norman Mailer}}
[[Category:Short Stories (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Inside Norman Mailer

2025-04-07T21:39:29Z

Chelsey.brantley: Change "literary" to "Iiterary" since the misspelling is in the original text

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR04}}
{{Working}} 

{{Byline|last=Apple|first=Max|note=Reprinted by permission of the author, Max Apple. From {{cite book |last= |first= |date= |title=The Oranging of America |url= |location=New York |publisher=Viking |year=1976 |pages=49-60 |ref=harv }}|url=....}}

==I==
So what if I could kick the shit out of Truman Capote, and who really cares that once in a Newark bar, unknown to each other, I sprained the wrist of E. L. Doctorow in a harmless arm wrestle. For years I’ve kicked around in out-of-the-way places, sparred for a few bucks or just for kicks with the likes of Scrap Iron Johnson, Phil Rahv, Kenny Burke, and Chico Vejar. But, you know, I’m getting older too. When I feel the quick arthritic pains fly through my knuckles, I ask myself, Where are your poems and novels? Where are your long-limbed girls with cunts like tangerines? Yes, I’ve had a few successes. There are towns in America where people recognize me on the street and ask what I’m up to these days. ‘’I’m thirty-three,” I tell them, “in the top of my form. I’m up to the best. I’m up to Norman Mailer.”

They think I’m kidding, but the history of our game is speckled with the
unlikely. Look at Pete Rademacher—not even a pro. Fresh from a three-round Olympic decision, he got a shot at Floyd Patterson, made the cover of
''Sports Illustrated'', picked up an easy hundred grand. Now that is one fight
that Mr. Mailer, the Iiterary lion, chose not to discuss. The clash between
pro and amateur didn’t grab his imagination like two spades in Africa or the
dark passion of Emile Griffith. Yes, you know how to pick your spots, Norman. I who have studied your moves think that your best instinct is judgment. It’s your secret punch. You knew how to stake out Kennedy and
Goldwater, but on the whole you kept arm’s length from Nixon. Humphrey
never earned you a dime.

Ali, the moon, scrappy broads, dirty walls, all meat to you, slugger. But {{pg|504|505}} even Norman Mailer has misplayed a few. Remember the Chassidic tales? The rabbi pose was one you couldn’t quite pull off, but you cut your losses fast, the mark of a real pro, and I fully expect that you’ll come back to that one yet to cash in big on theology. Maybe at sixty you’ll throw a birthday party for yourself in the Jerusalem Hilton. You’ll roll up in an ancient scroll, grow earlocks, and say, “This is the big one, the one I’ve been waiting for.” With Allen Ginsberg along on a leash you’ll clank through the holy cities living on nuts and distilled water and sell your films as a legitimate appendix to the New Testament.

If I had the patience I’d wait for that religious revival and be your Boswell, then I’d drive off that whole crew of trainers and seconds who tag after you, but by then I’ll be almost fifty and maybe too slow to do you justice. As the rabbis said: “Reputation is a meal, energy a food stamp.” It’s ''toches affen tisch'', you understand that, big boy? I’m spotting you seventy pounds, a dozen books, wives, children, memories, millions in the bank. My weapons are desperation, neglect, and bad form. I am the C student in a mediocre college, the madman in the crowd, the quaint gunman who rides into Dodge City because he’s heard they have good restaurants. We share only a mutual desire to let it all take place in public, in the open. This is the way Mailer has always played it, this I learned from you. Why envy from afar when I can pummel you in a lighted ring. Your reputation makes it possible. You who are composed of genes and risks, you appreciate the wildness of strangers. Anyway, you think you’ll nail me in one.

While I, for months, have been running fifteen miles a day and eating
natural food, you train by scratching your nuts with a soft rubber eraser. You take walks in the moonlight and turn the clichés inside out. For you they make way. Sidewalks tilt, lovers quarrel. People whisper your name to each other, give you wholesale prices and numerous gifts. An “Okay” from Norman Mailer makes a career. Power like this there has not been since Catullus in old Rome carried on his instep Caesar’s daughter.

I’ll give you this much: you have come by it honestly. Not by bribery and not by marriage, not by family ties and not by wealth, not by good luck alone or by the breaks of the game. You have plenty, Slugger, that I’ll admit. But I do not come at you like a barbarian. The latest technology is in my corner. The Schick 1000-watt blow-dryer, trunks by Haspel, robe by Mr. Mann, Jovan cologne. Adidas kidskin shoes travel three quarters of my shin with laces of mandarin silk. From my flesh, coated with Vaseline and Desenex, {{pg|505|506}} the sweat breaks forth like pearls. My desperation grows muscular in the bright lights. I am the fatted calf.

You stand in your corner like Walt Whitman. No electric outlets, cheap
cotton YMCA trunks, even your gloves look used. Your red robe just says “Norm.” You wear sneakers and no socks. I should take you the Oriental way by working your feet up to blisters and then stepping on your toes, but I lack the Chinaman’s patience. No, it will have to be head to head, although everyone has cautioned me about trading punches with you.

Last week a crowd of critics came out to my camp in a chartered bus.
They carried canes and magnifying glasses. They told me to evaluate each
punch from the shoulder. “Let your elbow be the judge,” Robert Penn Warren said; “Sting like an irony,” from Booth of Chicago. They told me that if I win I’ll get an honorary degree from Kenyon and a job at one of the best gyms in the Midwest. Like a Greek chorus they stood beside my training ring and sang in unison, “Don’t slug it out, move and think. Speed and reflexes beat out power. To the victor goes the victory.”

“Scram.” I yelled, spitting my between-the-rounds mouthwash. “Get lost you crummy bastards. You shit on my poems and laughed off my stories,
now you want some of my body language. Go study the ambiguities of
Harold Robbins.” I was mad as hell but they stood firm taking notes on my weight and reach. Finally a group of kids carrying “Free Rubin Carter” signs ran them back to the bus.

The press is no help either. They are so tired of promoting Ali against a bunch of nobodies that to them I’m just another Joe Bugner. They rarely call me by name. “Mailer’s latest victim to be” is their tag. The ''Times'' calls me a “man with little to recommend him. Slight. almost feline, with the gestures of a minor poet, this latest in a long series of Mailer baiters seems to have no more business in the ring with the master than Stan Ketchel had with Jack Johnson.No one is interested in this fight. The Astrodome will be bare, UHF refuses to televise, and Mailer has scheduled a reading for later that night at the University of Houston. Norman, why do you keep accepting every challenge from the peanut gallery? Let’s stop this Christians versus Lions until there is a real contender. Now, if the Pynchon backers could come up with a site and a solid guarantee, that might be a real match.”

You know what I say, I say, “Fuck the ''Times''.” They gave Clay no chance
against Big Bad Sonny Liston, and four years later the “meanest, toughest” {{pg|506|507}} champ the ''Times'' ever saw dropped dead while tying his shoes and Muhammad built a Temple for Elijah M. So much for the sports writers.

But there are a few people who understand. Teddy White will be in my corner and Senator Proxmire at ringside. ''The Realist'' and the L.A. ''Free Press'' have picked me. The DAR sent a fruit basket. Outside the literary crowd I’m actually well liked. Cesar Chavez and the migrants from South Texas are coming up to cheer for me and my friend Ira from Minneapolis and the whole English department of my school. All the Democratic Presidential candidates sent telegrams; so did Bill Buckley, Mayor Beame, Gore Vidal, Irving Wallace, John Ehrlichman, and Herman Kahn. . . . All I can say is, when the time comes boys, I’ll be ready, just watch.

==II==
Our first face-to-face meeting is at the weigh-in. He wanted to dispense with it and turn in a morning urine specimen instead. The boxing commission
put the nix on that idea. Oh, he knew who I was before the weigh-in. We had traded photos, autographs, and once I had anthologized him.
But face to face on either side of a big metal scale with our robes on and Teddy White rubbing my back while I stare bullets, that is something else
again.

He nods, I look away. He can afford to be gracious. If I win, I’ll make a
handsome donation to UNICEF in his honor. For now, I button my lip. He
chats with White about convention sites, claims that because of tonight he’ll have an insider’s if they do the ’76 one in the Astrodome.

I come in at one hundred forty-four and three quarters, thirty-four-inch reach. He is two hundred fourteen and a thirty-inch reach. He spots me the reach and eighteen years. I give him seventy pounds and a ton of reputation. He has enough grace under pressure to teach at a ballet school, but the smile discloses bad teeth. I’ll remember that. His body hairs are graying. I can see that he has not trained and could use sleep. My tongue lies at the bottom of my mouth. “Good luck, kid,” he says, but I have removed my contact lenses and only learn later that it was the Great One in a magnanimous gesture whom I snubbed because I had to take a leak.

==III==
The Dome is a half-empty cave. At the last minute they lowered all tickets to a buck, and thousands popped in to see the King. To me the crowd means {{pg|507|508}} nothing. It is as anonymous as the whir of an air conditioner. I stare at the
Everlast trademark on my gloves and practice keeping the mouthpiece in
without gagging. “Stay loose,” Teddy yells over the din, “stay loose as a goose
and box like a fox.”

I dance in my corner for three or four minutes before he appears. The crowd goes wild when that woolly head jogs up the ramp. He climbs through the ropes and goes to center ring. He throws kisses with both open gloves. He
is wearing the same YMCA trunks and cheap sneakers, but his robe is a threadbare terrycloth without a name. It looks like something he picked up at Goodwill on the way over. The crowd loves his slovenliness.

“To each his own,” I whisper to myself as I ask Teddy for a final hit with the blow-dryer. My curls are tight as iron; his hang like eggshells crowding around his ears. He throws a kiss to me; I try to return it with the finger but my glove makes it a hand.

The referee motions us to center ring. We both requested Ruby Goldstein
but the old pro wouldn’t come out of retirement for a match like this one. I then asked for the Brown Bomber and Mailer wanted Jersey Joe. Finally we compromised on Archie Moore, who has a goatee now and is wearing a yellow leisure suit as he calls us together for a review of the rules. I notice that he is wearing street shoes and think to protest, but I see that he needs the black patent pumps in order to make his trousers break at the step. A good sign, I think. Archie will be with me.

He goes over the mandatory eight count and the three-knockdown rule,
but Mailer and I ignore the words. Our eyes meet and mine are ready for
his. For countless hours I have trained before a mirror with his snapshot taped to the middle. I have had blown up to poster size that old ''Esquire'' pose of him in the ring, and I am ready for what I know will be the first real encounter. My eyes are steady on his. In the first few seconds I see boredom, I see sweet brown eyes that would open into yawning mouthlike cavities if they could. I see indifferent eyes and gay youthful glances. Checkbook eyes. Evelyn Wood eyes. Then suddenly he blinks and I have my first triumph. Fear pops out. Plain old unabashed fear. Not trembling, not panic, just a little fear. And I’ve found it in the eyes, exactly like the nineteenth-century writers used to before Mailer switched it to the asshole. I smile and he knows that I know. Anger replaces the fear but the edge is mine, big boy. All the sportswriters and oddsmakers haven’t lulled you. You know that every time you step into the ring it’s like going to the {{pg|508|509}} doctor with a slight cough that with a little twist of the DNA turns out to
be cancer. You, old cancermonger, you know this better than anyone. In
my small frame, in my gleaming slightly feline gestures you have smelled
the blood test, the chest x-ray, the specialist, the lies, the operations, the false hopes, the statistics. Yes, Norman, you looked at me or through me and in some distant future that maybe I carry in my hands like a telegram, there you glimpsed that old bugaboo and it went straight to your prostate, to your bladder, and to your heavy fingertips. In a second, Norm, you built me up. Oh, I have grown big on your fear. Giant killers have to so that they can reach up for the fatal stab to the heart.

No camera has recorded this. Nor has Archie Moore repeating his memorized monologue noted our exchange. Only you and I, Norm, understand.
This is as it should be. You have given dignity to my challenge; like a sovereign government you have recognized my hopeless revolutionary state
and turned me, in a blink, credible, at least to you, at least where it counts. I slap my fists together and at the bell I meet you for the first time as an equal.

==IV==
The problem now is as old as realism. You don’t want all the grunts, the
shortness of breath, the sound of leather on skin, and I don’t want to tell you in great detail. But it’s all there, the throwing of punches, the clinches, the head butting, the swelling of injured faces. If I forget to, then you put it in. For I am too busy taking the measure of my opponent to feel the slap of his glove against my flesh. The bell has moved us into a new field of force. We drop our pens. The spotlight is the glare of eternity, and what it has all come to is simply the matter of Truth. “Existentialist” I call him, spitting out my mouthpiece, though in practice I have recited Peter Piper a dozen times and kept the mouthpiece in. “Dated existentialist. Insincere existentialist.
Jewish existentialist . . . ” I hit him with this smooth combination, but he continues to rush me bearlike, serene, full of skill and power.

“Campy lightweight,” he yells, in full charge as I sidestep his rush and he
tangles his upper body in the ropes.

I come up behind, and as well as I can with the gross movement of the
glove I pull back his head and expose the blue gnarled cacophony of his neck.

“I am Abraham and you the ram caught in the thicket,” I announce from behind. “I have been an outcast in many lands, I bear the covenant, and you {{pg|509|510}} full of power and goatish lust, you carry the false demon out of whose curved horn I will blow my own triumph and salvation.”

“How unlike an Abraham thou art,” he responds, gasping from his entanglement in the ropes. “Where is thy son then and where thy handmaiden Hagar, whom thou so ungenerously got with a child of false promise and then discarded into the wilderness? Thou art an assumer of historical identities, a chameleon of literary pretension.”

I reach into the empty air for the sword of slaughter when Archie Moore separates us, rights Mailer, and warns me about hair pulling and exposing the
jugular of my opponent.

Now we stalk one another at center ring. He, not having trained, not having rested, not having regarded my challenge as serious, he is ready almost at once to revert to instinctive behavior. He wants it all animal now and tries
to bite off his glove so that he can come atme with ten fingers. But I am still in the airy realms of the mind. I see and discern his actions. How coarse appears the Mailer saliva upon his worn gloves, how disgusting his tongue and
crooked teeth as they nibble at the strings. His mouth has become as a loom with the glove lace moving between his teeth on the slow, feeble power of his
tongue.

“The Industrial Revolution,” I yell across the ring, and his gloves drop, his mouth is open and agape. I land a hard right to his jaw and feel the ligaments stretch. At the bell he is dazed and hurt. He moves to his corner like an old man in an unemployment line.

I stand in the middle of the ring and watch the slow shuffle toward comfort of this man whom most enlightened folks thought I could not withstand for even three minutes. So carefully have I trained, so honest has been
my fifteen miles of daily roadwork that the first round of exertion has
scarcely left me breathless. While Norman is in his corner swishing his
mouth, having his brow mopped, I am in mid-ring, stunned with my opening achievement. I have stayed a full round with him. I have seen the fear in his eyes and the beast in his soul. I have felt the heft of his sweating form in a heavy embrace. In the clinch, as our protective cups clicked against each other, there have I surmised his lust. For three metaphysical moments we two white men have embraced in violence while old black Archie pares his perfect fingernails in the midst of us.

“Don’t forget the game plan,” Teddy is yelling from my corner. He wants
my help in pulling the blackboard through the ropes. I come out of my {{pg|510|511}}reverie to help him. Oh, I have been waiting for this moment, and now but
for good old Teddy I might have forgotten. Like the most careful teacher printing large block letters for an eager second grade, I inscribe and turn to four sides so all can see, “The Naked and the Dead Is His Best Work.”

When Norman reads my inscription, he is swishing Gatorade in his
mouth while his second, Richard Poirier, applies with a Q-tip glycerine and rosewater to the Mailer lips. When my barb registers, he swallows the
Gatorade and bites the Q-tip in half. Poirier and José Torres can barely keep
him on his stool. They whisper frantically, each in an ear. Archie is across the ring getting a quick shine from a boy who manages, on tiptoe, to reach
with his buffing cloth up to the apron of the elevated ring. Arch kneels to tip
with an autograph.

When the bell tolls round two, I face a Mailer who has with herculean effort
quickly calmed himself. He has sucked in his cheeks for control and
looks, for the moment, like a tubercular housewife. I see immediately that he
has beaten back the demiurge. We will stay in the realms of the intellect. His
gloves are completely laced and his steps are tight and full of control. He dances over to the ropes and beckons me with an open glove to taste his
newness.

Who do you think I am, Norm? Didn’t I travel half a world with no hope
of writing a book about it to watch Ali lure George Foreman to the ropes? Not for me, Norm, is your coy ease along the top strand. I’ll wait and take you in the open. You see, I learned more than you did in Africa. While you holed up in an air-conditioned hotel and resurrected those eight rounds for your half a million advance, I thumbed my way to what was once called Biafra. I went to the cemetery where Dick Tiger lies dead of causes unknown at age thirty-five in newly prosperous Nigeria. How did you miss Dick Tiger? You who were the first white negro, you the crown prince of nigger-lovers, you missed the ace of the jungle. Yes, he was the heart of the dark continent, the Aristotle of Africa. A middleweight and a revolutionary. While you clowned around with Torres and Ali and Emile Griffith, Tiger packed his gear and headed home to see what he could pick clean from the starvation and the slaughter. He went home to face bad times and bad people and was dead a week after his plane touched down. Where were you and the sportswriters, Norm, when Dick Tiger needed you? I at least made the trek to the resting
place of the hero, and it was there in the holy calm of his forgotten tomb that I vowed to come back and make my move. No one offered me a penny {{pg|511|512}} for “The Dick Tiger Story” as told to me, so you won’t get it now either. Come out to the middle, Norm. No, you’re still coy, relaxed; well, two can play that
one.

I sit down in the corner opposite him; I fan myself with the mouthpiece.
To the audience it looks as if we’re kidding. He sloping against the ropes, I twenty-five feet away pretending I’m at a picnic in the English countryside. Real fight fans know what’s up. There is only a certain amount of available energy. In the universe it’s called entropy; in the ring it is known as “ppf,” punches per flurry. Neither of us has the strength at this moment to muster the necessary ten to twelve ppf’s to really damage the other. Fighters trained in the Golden Gloves or various homes for juvenile delinquents will go through the motions anyway. They will stalk and butt and sweat upon each other. But Mailer and I, knowing the score, wait out the round. Archie Moore leafs through the Texas Boxing Commission rules. Some fans boo, others take advantage of the lull to refresh themselves.

For me, every second is a victory. Round by round I wear the laurel and the bay. Who thought I could even last the first? Five will get me tenure, seven and I’ll be a dean. Yes, I can wait, Norm, until you come to me in midring
with all that bulk and experience. Come to me with your strength, your
wisdom, your compassion, and your insight. This time at the bell we are
both giggling, aware each to each of the resined canvas upon which we paint our destinies.

I walk over to his corner where he sits on his stool, kingly again, not hurt as he was after round one. He offers me a drink from his green bottle. We spit into the same bucket. I know his seconds don’t like me coming over there between rounds. Poirier turns away but Norman smiles, cuffs me playfully behind the neck. Together we walk out to await the bell.

For twice three minutes we have traveled the same turf. Ambition and
gravity have held us in a dialectical encounter, but as round three begins, Mailer’s old friend the irrational joins us. No matter that I actually see the
pig-tailed form of my sister beckoning me between mouthfuls of popcorn to rush at you. Aeneas, Hector, Dick Tiger, they too saw the phantoms that promise the sunshine and delight after one quick lunge. My sister is nine years old. She wears a gingham dress. She is right there beside you, close
enough for Archie to stumble on.

“Watch out, kid,” I say, “you shouldn’t even be here.” “It’s okay,” Mailer says. “She has my permission.”{{pg|512|513}}
She throws the empty popcorn box over the ropes. “Please take me home,” she whimpers, and as she stands there the power enters me, the ppf quotient floods my own soul, and I rush, not in fear, not in anger, but in full sweet confidence, I rush with both fists to the middle of Norman Mailer.

First my left with all its quixotic force and then my sure and solid right lands in the valley of his solar plexus. Next my head in a raw, cruel butt joins
the piston arms. Hands, arms, head, neck, back, legs. As a boy for the first time shakes the high dive in the presence of his parents, with such pride do
I dive. And with the power of falling human weight knifing through the chlorine-dark pool do I catapult. As a surgeon lays open flesh, indifferently, thinking not of tumors but of the arc of his raquet in full backswing, with
such professional ease am I engulfed.

I hear the wind leave his lungs. Like large soft earlobes, they shade me from the glare of his heart. The sound of his digestive juices is rhythmic and
I resonate to the music of his inner organs. I hear the liver weakened from drink but on key still, the gentle reek of kidneys, the questioning solo of pancreas, the harmonicalike appendix, all here all around me, and the cautionary
voice of my mother: “Be careful, little one, when you hit someone so
hard in the stomach. That’s how Houdini died.”

Somewhere else Archie Moore is counting ten over a prone loser. Judges are packing up scorecards and handbags snap shut. I am comfortable in the
damp prison of his rib cage. His blood explodes like little Hiroshimas every second.

“Concentrate,” says Mailer, “so the experience will not be wasted on you.”

“It’s hard,” I say, “amid the color and distraction.”

“I know,” says my gentle master, “but think about one big thing.”

I concentrate on the new edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. It works. My mind is less a palimpsest, more a blank page.

“You may be too young to remember,” he says, “James Jones and James T. Farrell and James Gould Cozzens and dozens like them. I took them all on, absorbed all they had and went on my way, just like Shakespeare ate up
''Tottel’s Miscellany''.”

“No lectures,” I gasp, “only truths.”

“I am the Twentieth Century,” Mailer says. “Go forth from here toward the east and earn your bread by the sweat of your brow. Never write another line
nor raise a fist to any man.” His words and his music are like Christmas
morning. I go forth, a seer.
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Inside Norman Mailer}}
[[Category:Short Stories (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Inside Norman Mailer

2025-04-02T02:01:45Z

Chelsey.brantley:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR04}}
{{Working}} 

{{Byline|last=Apple|first=Max|note=Reprinted by permission of the author, Max Apple. From {{cite book |last= |first= |date= |title=The Oranging of America |url= |location=New York |publisher=Viking |year=1976 |pages=49-60 |ref=harv }}|url=....}}

==I==
So what if I could kick the shit out of Truman Capote, and who really cares that once in a Newark bar, unknown to each other, I sprained the wrist of E. L. Doctorow in a harmless arm wrestle. For years I’ve kicked around in out-of-the-way places, sparred for a few bucks or just for kicks with the likes of Scrap Iron Johnson, Phil Rahv, Kenny Burke, and Chico Vejar. But, you know, I’m getting older too. When I feel the quick arthritic pains fly through my knuckles, I ask myself, Where are your poems and novels? Where are your long-limbed girls with cunts like tangerines? Yes, I’ve had a few successes. There are towns in America where people recognize me on the street and ask what I’m up to these days. ‘’I’m thirty-three,” I tell them, “in the top of my form. I’m up to the best. I’m up to Norman Mailer.”

They think I’m kidding, but the history of our game is speckled with the
unlikely. Look at Pete Rademacher—not even a pro. Fresh from a three-round Olympic decision, he got a shot at Floyd Patterson, made the cover of
''Sports Illustrated'', picked up an easy hundred grand. Now that is one fight
that Mr. Mailer, the literary lion, chose not to discuss. The clash between
pro and amateur didn’t grab his imagination like two spades in Africa or the
dark passion of Emile Griffith. Yes, you know how to pick your spots, Norman. I who have studied your moves think that your best instinct is judgment. It’s your secret punch. You knew how to stake out Kennedy and
Goldwater, but on the whole you kept arm’s length from Nixon. Humphrey
never earned you a dime.

Ali, the moon, scrappy broads, dirty walls, all meat to you, slugger. But {{pg|504|505}} even Norman Mailer has misplayed a few. Remember the Chassidic tales? The rabbi pose was one you couldn’t quite pull off, but you cut your losses fast, the mark of a real pro, and I fully expect that you’ll come back to that one yet to cash in big on theology. Maybe at sixty you’ll throw a birthday party for yourself in the Jerusalem Hilton. You’ll roll up in an ancient scroll, grow earlocks, and say, “This is the big one, the one I’ve been waiting for.” With Allen Ginsberg along on a leash you’ll clank through the holy cities living on nuts and distilled water and sell your films as a legitimate appendix to the New Testament.

If I had the patience I’d wait for that religious revival and be your Boswell, then I’d drive off that whole crew of trainers and seconds who tag after you, but by then I’ll be almost fifty and maybe too slow to do you justice. As the rabbis said: “Reputation is a meal, energy a food stamp.” It’s ''toches affen tisch'', you understand that, big boy? I’m spotting you seventy pounds, a dozen books, wives, children, memories, millions in the bank. My weapons are desperation, neglect, and bad form. I am the C student in a mediocre college, the madman in the crowd, the quaint gunman who rides into Dodge City because he’s heard they have good restaurants. We share only a mutual desire to let it all take place in public, in the open. This is the way Mailer has always played it, this I learned from you. Why envy from afar when I can pummel you in a lighted ring. Your reputation makes it possible. You who are composed of genes and risks, you appreciate the wildness of strangers. Anyway, you think you’ll nail me in one.

While I, for months, have been running fifteen miles a day and eating
natural food, you train by scratching your nuts with a soft rubber eraser. You take walks in the moonlight and turn the clichés inside out. For you they make way. Sidewalks tilt, lovers quarrel. People whisper your name to each other, give you wholesale prices and numerous gifts. An “Okay” from Norman Mailer makes a career. Power like this there has not been since Catullus in old Rome carried on his instep Caesar’s daughter.

I’ll give you this much: you have come by it honestly. Not by bribery and not by marriage, not by family ties and not by wealth, not by good luck alone or by the breaks of the game. You have plenty, Slugger, that I’ll admit. But I do not come at you like a barbarian. The latest technology is in my corner. The Schick 1000-watt blow-dryer, trunks by Haspel, robe by Mr. Mann, Jovan cologne. Adidas kidskin shoes travel three quarters of my shin with laces of mandarin silk. From my flesh, coated with Vaseline and Desenex, {{pg|505|506}} the sweat breaks forth like pearls. My desperation grows muscular in the bright lights. I am the fatted calf.

You stand in your corner like Walt Whitman. No electric outlets, cheap
cotton YMCA trunks, even your gloves look used. Your red robe just says “Norm.” You wear sneakers and no socks. I should take you the Oriental way by working your feet up to blisters and then stepping on your toes, but I lack the Chinaman’s patience. No, it will have to be head to head, although everyone has cautioned me about trading punches with you.

Last week a crowd of critics came out to my camp in a chartered bus.
They carried canes and magnifying glasses. They told me to evaluate each
punch from the shoulder. “Let your elbow be the judge,” Robert Penn Warren said; “Sting like an irony,” from Booth of Chicago. They told me that if I win I’ll get an honorary degree from Kenyon and a job at one of the best gyms in the Midwest. Like a Greek chorus they stood beside my training ring and sang in unison, “Don’t slug it out, move and think. Speed and reflexes beat out power. To the victor goes the victory.”

“Scram.” I yelled, spitting my between-the-rounds mouthwash. “Get lost you crummy bastards. You shit on my poems and laughed off my stories,
now you want some of my body language. Go study the ambiguities of
Harold Robbins.” I was mad as hell but they stood firm taking notes on my weight and reach. Finally a group of kids carrying “Free Rubin Carter” signs ran them back to the bus.

The press is no help either. They are so tired of promoting Ali against a bunch of nobodies that to them I’m just another Joe Bugner. They rarely call me by name. “Mailer’s latest victim to be” is their tag. The ''Times'' calls me a “man with little to recommend him. Slight. almost feline, with the gestures of a minor poet, this latest in a long series of Mailer baiters seems to have no more business in the ring with the master than Stan Ketchel had with Jack Johnson.No one is interested in this fight. The Astrodome will be bare, UHF refuses to televise, and Mailer has scheduled a reading for later that night at the University of Houston. Norman, why do you keep accepting every challenge from the peanut gallery? Let’s stop this Christians versus Lions until there is a real contender. Now, if the Pynchon backers could come up with a site and a solid guarantee, that might be a real match.”

You know what I say, I say, “Fuck the ''Times''.” They gave Clay no chance
against Big Bad Sonny Liston, and four years later the “meanest, toughest” {{pg|506|507}} champ the ''Times'' ever saw dropped dead while tying his shoes and Muhammad built a Temple for Elijah M. So much for the sports writers.

But there are a few people who understand. Teddy White will be in my corner and Senator Proxmire at ringside. ''The Realist'' and the L.A. ''Free Press'' have picked me. The DAR sent a fruit basket. Outside the literary crowd I’m actually well liked. Cesar Chavez and the migrants from South Texas are coming up to cheer for me and my friend Ira from Minneapolis and the whole English department of my school. All the Democratic Presidential candidates sent telegrams; so did Bill Buckley, Mayor Beame, Gore Vidal, Irving Wallace, John Ehrlichman, and Herman Kahn. . . . All I can say is, when the time comes boys, I’ll be ready, just watch.

==II==
Our first face-to-face meeting is at the weigh-in. He wanted to dispense with it and turn in a morning urine specimen instead. The boxing commission
put the nix on that idea. Oh, he knew who I was before the weigh-in. We had traded photos, autographs, and once I had anthologized him.
But face to face on either side of a big metal scale with our robes on and Teddy White rubbing my back while I stare bullets, that is something else
again.

He nods, I look away. He can afford to be gracious. If I win, I’ll make a
handsome donation to UNICEF in his honor. For now, I button my lip. He
chats with White about convention sites, claims that because of tonight he’ll have an insider’s if they do the ’76 one in the Astrodome.

I come in at one hundred forty-four and three quarters, thirty-four-inch reach. He is two hundred fourteen and a thirty-inch reach. He spots me the reach and eighteen years. I give him seventy pounds and a ton of reputation. He has enough grace under pressure to teach at a ballet school, but the smile discloses bad teeth. I’ll remember that. His body hairs are graying. I can see that he has not trained and could use sleep. My tongue lies at the bottom of my mouth. “Good luck, kid,” he says, but I have removed my contact lenses and only learn later that it was the Great One in a magnanimous gesture whom I snubbed because I had to take a leak.

==III==
The Dome is a half-empty cave. At the last minute they lowered all tickets to a buck, and thousands popped in to see the King. To me the crowd means {{pg|507|508}} nothing. It is as anonymous as the whir of an air conditioner. I stare at the
Everlast trademark on my gloves and practice keeping the mouthpiece in
without gagging. “Stay loose,” Teddy yells over the din, “stay loose as a goose
and box like a fox.”

I dance in my corner for three or four minutes before he appears. The crowd goes wild when that woolly head jogs up the ramp. He climbs through the ropes and goes to center ring. He throws kisses with both open gloves. He
is wearing the same YMCA trunks and cheap sneakers, but his robe is a threadbare terrycloth without a name. It looks like something he picked up at Goodwill on the way over. The crowd loves his slovenliness.

“To each his own,” I whisper to myself as I ask Teddy for a final hit with the blow-dryer. My curls are tight as iron; his hang like eggshells crowding around his ears. He throws a kiss to me; I try to return it with the finger but my glove makes it a hand.

The referee motions us to center ring. We both requested Ruby Goldstein
but the old pro wouldn’t come out of retirement for a match like this one. I then asked for the Brown Bomber and Mailer wanted Jersey Joe. Finally we compromised on Archie Moore, who has a goatee now and is wearing a yellow leisure suit as he calls us together for a review of the rules. I notice that he is wearing street shoes and think to protest, but I see that he needs the black patent pumps in order to make his trousers break at the step. A good sign, I think. Archie will be with me.

He goes over the mandatory eight count and the three-knockdown rule,
but Mailer and I ignore the words. Our eyes meet and mine are ready for
his. For countless hours I have trained before a mirror with his snapshot taped to the middle. I have had blown up to poster size that old ''Esquire'' pose of him in the ring, and I am ready for what I know will be the first real encounter. My eyes are steady on his. In the first few seconds I see boredom, I see sweet brown eyes that would open into yawning mouthlike cavities if they could. I see indifferent eyes and gay youthful glances. Checkbook eyes. Evelyn Wood eyes. Then suddenly he blinks and I have my first triumph. Fear pops out. Plain old unabashed fear. Not trembling, not panic, just a little fear. And I’ve found it in the eyes, exactly like the nineteenth-century writers used to before Mailer switched it to the asshole. I smile and he knows that I know. Anger replaces the fear but the edge is mine, big boy. All the sportswriters and oddsmakers haven’t lulled you. You know that every time you step into the ring it’s like going to the {{pg|508|509}} doctor with a slight cough that with a little twist of the DNA turns out to
be cancer. You, old cancermonger, you know this better than anyone. In
my small frame, in my gleaming slightly feline gestures you have smelled
the blood test, the chest x-ray, the specialist, the lies, the operations, the false hopes, the statistics. Yes, Norman, you looked at me or through me and in some distant future that maybe I carry in my hands like a telegram, there you glimpsed that old bugaboo and it went straight to your prostate, to your bladder, and to your heavy fingertips. In a second, Norm, you built me up. Oh, I have grown big on your fear. Giant killers have to so that they can reach up for the fatal stab to the heart.

No camera has recorded this. Nor has Archie Moore repeating his memorized monologue noted our exchange. Only you and I, Norm, understand.
This is as it should be. You have given dignity to my challenge; like a sovereign government you have recognized my hopeless revolutionary state
and turned me, in a blink, credible, at least to you, at least where it counts. I slap my fists together and at the bell I meet you for the first time as an equal.

==IV==
The problem now is as old as realism. You don’t want all the grunts, the
shortness of breath, the sound of leather on skin, and I don’t want to tell you in great detail. But it’s all there, the throwing of punches, the clinches, the head butting, the swelling of injured faces. If I forget to, then you put it in. For I am too busy taking the measure of my opponent to feel the slap of his glove against my flesh. The bell has moved us into a new field of force. We drop our pens. The spotlight is the glare of eternity, and what it has all come to is simply the matter of Truth. “Existentialist” I call him, spitting out my mouthpiece, though in practice I have recited Peter Piper a dozen times and kept the mouthpiece in. “Dated existentialist. Insincere existentialist.
Jewish existentialist . . . ” I hit him with this smooth combination, but he continues to rush me bearlike, serene, full of skill and power.

“Campy lightweight,” he yells, in full charge as I sidestep his rush and he
tangles his upper body in the ropes.

I come up behind, and as well as I can with the gross movement of the
glove I pull back his head and expose the blue gnarled cacophony of his neck.

“I am Abraham and you the ram caught in the thicket,” I announce from behind. “I have been an outcast in many lands, I bear the covenant, and you {{pg|509|510}} full of power and goatish lust, you carry the false demon out of whose curved horn I will blow my own triumph and salvation.”

“How unlike an Abraham thou art,” he responds, gasping from his entanglement in the ropes. “Where is thy son then and where thy handmaiden Hagar, whom thou so ungenerously got with a child of false promise and then discarded into the wilderness? Thou art an assumer of historical identities, a chameleon of literary pretension.”

I reach into the empty air for the sword of slaughter when Archie Moore separates us, rights Mailer, and warns me about hair pulling and exposing the
jugular of my opponent.

Now we stalk one another at center ring. He, not having trained, not having rested, not having regarded my challenge as serious, he is ready almost at once to revert to instinctive behavior. He wants it all animal now and tries
to bite off his glove so that he can come atme with ten fingers. But I am still in the airy realms of the mind. I see and discern his actions. How coarse appears the Mailer saliva upon his worn gloves, how disgusting his tongue and
crooked teeth as they nibble at the strings. His mouth has become as a loom with the glove lace moving between his teeth on the slow, feeble power of his
tongue.

“The Industrial Revolution,” I yell across the ring, and his gloves drop, his mouth is open and agape. I land a hard right to his jaw and feel the ligaments stretch. At the bell he is dazed and hurt. He moves to his corner like an old man in an unemployment line.

I stand in the middle of the ring and watch the slow shuffle toward comfort of this man whom most enlightened folks thought I could not withstand for even three minutes. So carefully have I trained, so honest has been
my fifteen miles of daily roadwork that the first round of exertion has
scarcely left me breathless. While Norman is in his corner swishing his
mouth, having his brow mopped, I am in mid-ring, stunned with my opening achievement. I have stayed a full round with him. I have seen the fear in his eyes and the beast in his soul. I have felt the heft of his sweating form in a heavy embrace. In the clinch, as our protective cups clicked against each other, there have I surmised his lust. For three metaphysical moments we two white men have embraced in violence while old black Archie pares his perfect fingernails in the midst of us.

“Don’t forget the game plan,” Teddy is yelling from my corner. He wants
my help in pulling the blackboard through the ropes. I come out of my {{pg|510|511}}reverie to help him. Oh, I have been waiting for this moment, and now but
for good old Teddy I might have forgotten. Like the most careful teacher printing large block letters for an eager second grade, I inscribe and turn to four sides so all can see, “The Naked and the Dead Is His Best Work.”

When Norman reads my inscription, he is swishing Gatorade in his
mouth while his second, Richard Poirier, applies with a Q-tip glycerine and rosewater to the Mailer lips. When my barb registers, he swallows the
Gatorade and bites the Q-tip in half. Poirier and José Torres can barely keep
him on his stool. They whisper frantically, each in an ear. Archie is across the ring getting a quick shine from a boy who manages, on tiptoe, to reach
with his buffing cloth up to the apron of the elevated ring. Arch kneels to tip
with an autograph.

When the bell tolls round two, I face a Mailer who has with herculean effort
quickly calmed himself. He has sucked in his cheeks for control and
looks, for the moment, like a tubercular housewife. I see immediately that he
has beaten back the demiurge. We will stay in the realms of the intellect. His
gloves are completely laced and his steps are tight and full of control. He dances over to the ropes and beckons me with an open glove to taste his
newness.

Who do you think I am, Norm? Didn’t I travel half a world with no hope
of writing a book about it to watch Ali lure George Foreman to the ropes? Not for me, Norm, is your coy ease along the top strand. I’ll wait and take you in the open. You see, I learned more than you did in Africa. While you holed up in an air-conditioned hotel and resurrected those eight rounds for your half a million advance, I thumbed my way to what was once called Biafra. I went to the cemetery where Dick Tiger lies dead of causes unknown at age thirty-five in newly prosperous Nigeria. How did you miss Dick Tiger? You who were the first white negro, you the crown prince of nigger-lovers, you missed the ace of the jungle. Yes, he was the heart of the dark continent, the Aristotle of Africa. A middleweight and a revolutionary. While you clowned around with Torres and Ali and Emile Griffith, Tiger packed his gear and headed home to see what he could pick clean from the starvation and the slaughter. He went home to face bad times and bad people and was dead a week after his plane touched down. Where were you and the sportswriters, Norm, when Dick Tiger needed you? I at least made the trek to the resting
place of the hero, and it was there in the holy calm of his forgotten tomb that I vowed to come back and make my move. No one offered me a penny {{pg|511|512}} for “The Dick Tiger Story” as told to me, so you won’t get it now either. Come out to the middle, Norm. No, you’re still coy, relaxed; well, two can play that
one.

I sit down in the corner opposite him; I fan myself with the mouthpiece.
To the audience it looks as if we’re kidding. He sloping against the ropes, I twenty-five feet away pretending I’m at a picnic in the English countryside. Real fight fans know what’s up. There is only a certain amount of available energy. In the universe it’s called entropy; in the ring it is known as “ppf,” punches per flurry. Neither of us has the strength at this moment to muster the necessary ten to twelve ppf’s to really damage the other. Fighters trained in the Golden Gloves or various homes for juvenile delinquents will go through the motions anyway. They will stalk and butt and sweat upon each other. But Mailer and I, knowing the score, wait out the round. Archie Moore leafs through the Texas Boxing Commission rules. Some fans boo, others take advantage of the lull to refresh themselves.

For me, every second is a victory. Round by round I wear the laurel and the bay. Who thought I could even last the first? Five will get me tenure, seven and I’ll be a dean. Yes, I can wait, Norm, until you come to me in midring
with all that bulk and experience. Come to me with your strength, your
wisdom, your compassion, and your insight. This time at the bell we are
both giggling, aware each to each of the resined canvas upon which we paint our destinies.

I walk over to his corner where he sits on his stool, kingly again, not hurt as he was after round one. He offers me a drink from his green bottle. We spit into the same bucket. I know his seconds don’t like me coming over there between rounds. Poirier turns away but Norman smiles, cuffs me playfully behind the neck. Together we walk out to await the bell.

For twice three minutes we have traveled the same turf. Ambition and
gravity have held us in a dialectical encounter, but as round three begins, Mailer’s old friend the irrational joins us. No matter that I actually see the
pig-tailed form of my sister beckoning me between mouthfuls of popcorn to rush at you. Aeneas, Hector, Dick Tiger, they too saw the phantoms that promise the sunshine and delight after one quick lunge. My sister is nine years old. She wears a gingham dress. She is right there beside you, close
enough for Archie to stumble on.

“Watch out, kid,” I say, “you shouldn’t even be here.” “It’s okay,” Mailer says. “She has my permission.”{{pg|512|513}}
She throws the empty popcorn box over the ropes. “Please take me home,” she whimpers, and as she stands there the power enters me, the ppf quotient floods my own soul, and I rush, not in fear, not in anger, but in full sweet confidence, I rush with both fists to the middle of Norman Mailer.

First my left with all its quixotic force and then my sure and solid right lands in the valley of his solar plexus. Next my head in a raw, cruel butt joins
the piston arms. Hands, arms, head, neck, back, legs. As a boy for the first time shakes the high dive in the presence of his parents, with such pride do
I dive. And with the power of falling human weight knifing through the chlorine-dark pool do I catapult. As a surgeon lays open flesh, indifferently, thinking not of tumors but of the arc of his raquet in full backswing, with
such professional ease am I engulfed.

I hear the wind leave his lungs. Like large soft earlobes, they shade me from the glare of his heart. The sound of his digestive juices is rhythmic and
I resonate to the music of his inner organs. I hear the liver weakened from drink but on key still, the gentle reek of kidneys, the questioning solo of pancreas, the harmonicalike appendix, all here all around me, and the cautionary
voice of my mother: “Be careful, little one, when you hit someone so
hard in the stomach. That’s how Houdini died.”

Somewhere else Archie Moore is counting ten over a prone loser. Judges are packing up scorecards and handbags snap shut. I am comfortable in the
damp prison of his rib cage. His blood explodes like little Hiroshimas every second.

“Concentrate,” says Mailer, “so the experience will not be wasted on you.”

“It’s hard,” I say, “amid the color and distraction.”

“I know,” says my gentle master, “but think about one big thing.”

I concentrate on the new edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. It works. My mind is less a palimpsest, more a blank page.

“You may be too young to remember,” he says, “James Jones and James T. Farrell and James Gould Cozzens and dozens like them. I took them all on, absorbed all they had and went on my way, just like Shakespeare ate up
''Tottel’s Miscellany''.”

“No lectures,” I gasp, “only truths.”

“I am the Twentieth Century,” Mailer says. “Go forth from here toward the east and earn your bread by the sweat of your brow. Never write another line
nor raise a fist to any man.” His words and his music are like Christmas
morning. I go forth, a seer.
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Inside Norman Mailer}}
[[Category:Short Stories (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Inside Norman Mailer

2025-04-02T01:59:46Z

Chelsey.brantley: Added final paragraphs

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR04}}
{{Working}} 

{{Byline|last=Apple|first=Max|note=Reprinted by permission of the author, Max Apple. From {{cite book |last= |first= |date= |title=The Oranging of America |url= |location=New York |publisher=Viking |year=1976 |pages=49-60 |ref=harv }}|url=....}}

==I==
So what if I could kick the shit out of Truman Capote, and who really cares that once in a Newark bar, unknown to each other, I sprained the wrist of E. L. Doctorow in a harmless arm wrestle. For years I’ve kicked around in out-of-the-way places, sparred for a few bucks or just for kicks with the likes of Scrap Iron Johnson, Phil Rahv, Kenny Burke, and Chico Vejar. But, you know, I’m getting older too. When I feel the quick arthritic pains fly through my knuckles, I ask myself, Where are your poems and novels? Where are your long-limbed girls with cunts like tangerines? Yes, I’ve had a few successes. There are towns in America where people recognize me on the street and ask what I’m up to these days. ‘’I’m thirty-three,” I tell them, “in the top of my form. I’m up to the best. I’m up to Norman Mailer.”

They think I’m kidding, but the history of our game is speckled with the
unlikely. Look at Pete Rademacher—not even a pro. Fresh from a three-round Olympic decision, he got a shot at Floyd Patterson, made the cover of
''Sports Illustrated'', picked up an easy hundred grand. Now that is one fight
that Mr. Mailer, the literary lion, chose not to discuss. The clash between
pro and amateur didn’t grab his imagination like two spades in Africa or the
dark passion of Emile Griffith. Yes, you know how to pick your spots, Norman. I who have studied your moves think that your best instinct is judgment. It’s your secret punch. You knew how to stake out Kennedy and
Goldwater, but on the whole you kept arm’s length from Nixon. Humphrey
never earned you a dime.

Ali, the moon, scrappy broads, dirty walls, all meat to you, slugger. But {{pg|504|505}} even Norman Mailer has misplayed a few. Remember the Chassidic tales? The rabbi pose was one you couldn’t quite pull off, but you cut your losses fast, the mark of a real pro, and I fully expect that you’ll come back to that one yet to cash in big on theology. Maybe at sixty you’ll throw a birthday party for yourself in the Jerusalem Hilton. You’ll roll up in an ancient scroll, grow earlocks, and say, “This is the big one, the one I’ve been waiting for.” With Allen Ginsberg along on a leash you’ll clank through the holy cities living on nuts and distilled water and sell your films as a legitimate appendix to the New Testament.

If I had the patience I’d wait for that religious revival and be your Boswell, then I’d drive off that whole crew of trainers and seconds who tag after you, but by then I’ll be almost fifty and maybe too slow to do you justice. As the rabbis said: “Reputation is a meal, energy a food stamp.” It’s ''toches affen tisch'', you understand that, big boy? I’m spotting you seventy pounds, a dozen books, wives, children, memories, millions in the bank. My weapons are desperation, neglect, and bad form. I am the C student in a mediocre college, the madman in the crowd, the quaint gunman who rides into Dodge City because he’s heard they have good restaurants. We share only a mutual desire to let it all take place in public, in the open. This is the way Mailer has always played it, this I learned from you. Why envy from afar when I can pummel you in a lighted ring. Your reputation makes it possible. You who are composed of genes and risks, you appreciate the wildness of strangers. Anyway, you think you’ll nail me in one.

While I, for months, have been running fifteen miles a day and eating
natural food, you train by scratching your nuts with a soft rubber eraser. You take walks in the moonlight and turn the clichés inside out. For you they make way. Sidewalks tilt, lovers quarrel. People whisper your name to each other, give you wholesale prices and numerous gifts. An “Okay” from Norman Mailer makes a career. Power like this there has not been since Catullus in old Rome carried on his instep Caesar’s daughter.

I’ll give you this much: you have come by it honestly. Not by bribery and not by marriage, not by family ties and not by wealth, not by good luck alone or by the breaks of the game. You have plenty, Slugger, that I’ll admit. But I do not come at you like a barbarian. The latest technology is in my corner. The Schick 1000-watt blow-dryer, trunks by Haspel, robe by Mr. Mann, Jovan cologne. Adidas kidskin shoes travel three quarters of my shin with laces of mandarin silk. From my flesh, coated with Vaseline and Desenex, {{pg|505|506}} the sweat breaks forth like pearls. My desperation grows muscular in the bright lights. I am the fatted calf.

You stand in your corner like Walt Whitman. No electric outlets, cheap
cotton YMCA trunks, even your gloves look used. Your red robe just says “Norm.” You wear sneakers and no socks. I should take you the Oriental way by working your feet up to blisters and then stepping on your toes, but I lack the Chinaman’s patience. No, it will have to be head to head, although everyone has cautioned me about trading punches with you.

Last week a crowd of critics came out to my camp in a chartered bus.
They carried canes and magnifying glasses. They told me to evaluate each
punch from the shoulder. “Let your elbow be the judge,” Robert Penn Warren said; “Sting like an irony,” from Booth of Chicago. They told me that if I win I’ll get an honorary degree from Kenyon and a job at one of the best gyms in the Midwest. Like a Greek chorus they stood beside my training ring and sang in unison, “Don’t slug it out, move and think. Speed and reflexes beat out power. To the victor goes the victory.”

“Scram.” I yelled, spitting my between-the-rounds mouthwash. “Get lost you crummy bastards. You shit on my poems and laughed off my stories,
now you want some of my body language. Go study the ambiguities of
Harold Robbins.” I was mad as hell but they stood firm taking notes on my weight and reach. Finally a group of kids carrying “Free Rubin Carter” signs ran them back to the bus.

The press is no help either. They are so tired of promoting Ali against a bunch of nobodies that to them I’m just another Joe Bugner. They rarely call me by name. “Mailer’s latest victim to be” is their tag. The ''Times'' calls me a “man with little to recommend him. Slight. almost feline, with the gestures of a minor poet, this latest in a long series of Mailer baiters seems to have no more business in the ring with the master than Stan Ketchel had with Jack Johnson.No one is interested in this fight. The Astrodome will be bare, UHF refuses to televise, and Mailer has scheduled a reading for later that night at the University of Houston. Norman, why do you keep accepting every challenge from the peanut gallery? Let’s stop this Christians versus Lions until there is a real contender. Now, if the Pynchon backers could come up with a site and a solid guarantee, that might be a real match.”

You know what I say, I say, “Fuck the ''Times''.” They gave Clay no chance
against Big Bad Sonny Liston, and four years later the “meanest, toughest” {{pg|506|507}} champ the ''Times'' ever saw dropped dead while tying his shoes and Muhammad built a Temple for Elijah M. So much for the sports writers.

But there are a few people who understand. Teddy White will be in my corner and Senator Proxmire at ringside. ''The Realist'' and the L.A. ''Free Press'' have picked me. The DAR sent a fruit basket. Outside the literary crowd I’m actually well liked. Cesar Chavez and the migrants from South Texas are coming up to cheer for me and my friend Ira from Minneapolis and the whole English department of my school. All the Democratic Presidential candidates sent telegrams; so did Bill Buckley, Mayor Beame, Gore Vidal, Irving Wallace, John Ehrlichman, and Herman Kahn. . . . All I can say is, when the time comes boys, I’ll be ready, just watch.

==II==
Our first face-to-face meeting is at the weigh-in. He wanted to dispense with it and turn in a morning urine specimen instead. The boxing commission
put the nix on that idea. Oh, he knew who I was before the weigh-in. We had traded photos, autographs, and once I had anthologized him.
But face to face on either side of a big metal scale with our robes on and Teddy White rubbing my back while I stare bullets, that is something else
again.

He nods, I look away. He can afford to be gracious. If I win, I’ll make a
handsome donation to UNICEF in his honor. For now, I button my lip. He
chats with White about convention sites, claims that because of tonight he’ll have an insider’s if they do the ’76 one in the Astrodome.

I come in at one hundred forty-four and three quarters, thirty-four-inch reach. He is two hundred fourteen and a thirty-inch reach. He spots me the reach and eighteen years. I give him seventy pounds and a ton of reputation. He has enough grace under pressure to teach at a ballet school, but the smile discloses bad teeth. I’ll remember that. His body hairs are graying. I can see that he has not trained and could use sleep. My tongue lies at the bottom of my mouth. “Good luck, kid,” he says, but I have removed my contact lenses and only learn later that it was the Great One in a magnanimous gesture whom I snubbed because I had to take a leak.

==III==
The Dome is a half-empty cave. At the last minute they lowered all tickets to a buck, and thousands popped in to see the King. To me the crowd means {{pg|507|508}} nothing. It is as anonymous as the whir of an air conditioner. I stare at the
Everlast trademark on my gloves and practice keeping the mouthpiece in
without gagging. “Stay loose,” Teddy yells over the din, “stay loose as a goose
and box like a fox.”

I dance in my corner for three or four minutes before he appears. The crowd goes wild when that woolly head jogs up the ramp. He climbs through the ropes and goes to center ring. He throws kisses with both open gloves. He
is wearing the same YMCA trunks and cheap sneakers, but his robe is a threadbare terrycloth without a name. It looks like something he picked up at Goodwill on the way over. The crowd loves his slovenliness.

“To each his own,” I whisper to myself as I ask Teddy for a final hit with the blow-dryer. My curls are tight as iron; his hang like eggshells crowding around his ears. He throws a kiss to me; I try to return it with the finger but my glove makes it a hand.

The referee motions us to center ring. We both requested Ruby Goldstein
but the old pro wouldn’t come out of retirement for a match like this one. I then asked for the Brown Bomber and Mailer wanted Jersey Joe. Finally we compromised on Archie Moore, who has a goatee now and is wearing a yellow leisure suit as he calls us together for a review of the rules. I notice that he is wearing street shoes and think to protest, but I see that he needs the black patent pumps in order to make his trousers break at the step. A good sign, I think. Archie will be with me.

He goes over the mandatory eight count and the three-knockdown rule,
but Mailer and I ignore the words. Our eyes meet and mine are ready for
his. For countless hours I have trained before a mirror with his snapshot taped to the middle. I have had blown up to poster size that old ''Esquire'' pose of him in the ring, and I am ready for what I know will be the first real encounter. My eyes are steady on his. In the first few seconds I see boredom, I see sweet brown eyes that would open into yawning mouthlike cavities if they could. I see indifferent eyes and gay youthful glances. Checkbook eyes. Evelyn Wood eyes. Then suddenly he blinks and I have my first triumph. Fear pops out. Plain old unabashed fear. Not trembling, not panic, just a little fear. And I’ve found it in the eyes, exactly like the nineteenth-century writers used to before Mailer switched it to the asshole. I smile and he knows that I know. Anger replaces the fear but the edge is mine, big boy. All the sportswriters and oddsmakers haven’t lulled you. You know that every time you step into the ring it’s like going to the {{pg|508|509}} doctor with a slight cough that with a little twist of the DNA turns out to
be cancer. You, old cancermonger, you know this better than anyone. In
my small frame, in my gleaming slightly feline gestures you have smelled
the blood test, the chest x-ray, the specialist, the lies, the operations, the false hopes, the statistics. Yes, Norman, you looked at me or through me and in some distant future that maybe I carry in my hands like a telegram, there you glimpsed that old bugaboo and it went straight to your prostate, to your bladder, and to your heavy fingertips. In a second, Norm, you built me up. Oh, I have grown big on your fear. Giant killers have to so that they can reach up for the fatal stab to the heart.

No camera has recorded this. Nor has Archie Moore repeating his memorized monologue noted our exchange. Only you and I, Norm, understand.
This is as it should be. You have given dignity to my challenge; like a sovereign government you have recognized my hopeless revolutionary state
and turned me, in a blink, credible, at least to you, at least where it counts. I slap my fists together and at the bell I meet you for the first time as an equal.

==IV==
The problem now is as old as realism. You don’t want all the grunts, the
shortness of breath, the sound of leather on skin, and I don’t want to tell you in great detail. But it’s all there, the throwing of punches, the clinches, the head butting, the swelling of injured faces. If I forget to, then you put it in. For I am too busy taking the measure of my opponent to feel the slap of his glove against my flesh. The bell has moved us into a new field of force. We drop our pens. The spotlight is the glare of eternity, and what it has all come to is simply the matter of Truth. “Existentialist” I call him, spitting out my mouthpiece, though in practice I have recited Peter Piper a dozen times and kept the mouthpiece in. “Dated existentialist. Insincere existentialist.
Jewish existentialist . . . ” I hit him with this smooth combination, but he continues to rush me bearlike, serene, full of skill and power.

“Campy lightweight,” he yells, in full charge as I sidestep his rush and he
tangles his upper body in the ropes.

I come up behind, and as well as I can with the gross movement of the
glove I pull back his head and expose the blue gnarled cacophony of his neck.

“I am Abraham and you the ram caught in the thicket,” I announce from behind. “I have been an outcast in many lands, I bear the covenant, and you {{pg|509|510}} full of power and goatish lust, you carry the false demon out of whose curved horn I will blow my own triumph and salvation.”

“How unlike an Abraham thou art,” he responds, gasping from his entanglement in the ropes. “Where is thy son then and where thy handmaiden Hagar, whom thou so ungenerously got with a child of false promise and then discarded into the wilderness? Thou art an assumer of historical identities, a chameleon of literary pretension.”

I reach into the empty air for the sword of slaughter when Archie Moore separates us, rights Mailer, and warns me about hair pulling and exposing the
jugular of my opponent.

Now we stalk one another at center ring. He, not having trained, not having rested, not having regarded my challenge as serious, he is ready almost at once to revert to instinctive behavior. He wants it all animal now and tries
to bite off his glove so that he can come atme with ten fingers. But I am still in the airy realms of the mind. I see and discern his actions. How coarse appears the Mailer saliva upon his worn gloves, how disgusting his tongue and
crooked teeth as they nibble at the strings. His mouth has become as a loom with the glove lace moving between his teeth on the slow, feeble power of his
tongue.

“The Industrial Revolution,” I yell across the ring, and his gloves drop, his mouth is open and agape. I land a hard right to his jaw and feel the ligaments stretch. At the bell he is dazed and hurt. He moves to his corner like an old man in an unemployment line.

I stand in the middle of the ring and watch the slow shuffle toward comfort of this man whom most enlightened folks thought I could not withstand for even three minutes. So carefully have I trained, so honest has been
my fifteen miles of daily roadwork that the first round of exertion has
scarcely left me breathless. While Norman is in his corner swishing his
mouth, having his brow mopped, I am in mid-ring, stunned with my opening achievement. I have stayed a full round with him. I have seen the fear in his eyes and the beast in his soul. I have felt the heft of his sweating form in a heavy embrace. In the clinch, as our protective cups clicked against each other, there have I surmised his lust. For three metaphysical moments we two white men have embraced in violence while old black Archie pares his perfect fingernails in the midst of us.

“Don’t forget the game plan,” Teddy is yelling from my corner. He wants
my help in pulling the blackboard through the ropes. I come out of my {{pg|510|511}}reverie to help him. Oh, I have been waiting for this moment, and now but
for good old Teddy I might have forgotten. Like the most careful teacher printing large block letters for an eager second grade, I inscribe and turn to four sides so all can see, “The Naked and the Dead Is His Best Work.”

When Norman reads my inscription, he is swishing Gatorade in his
mouth while his second, Richard Poirier, applies with a Q-tip glycerine and rosewater to the Mailer lips. When my barb registers, he swallows the
Gatorade and bites the Q-tip in half. Poirier and José Torres can barely keep
him on his stool. They whisper frantically, each in an ear. Archie is across the ring getting a quick shine from a boy who manages, on tiptoe, to reach
with his buffing cloth up to the apron of the elevated ring. Arch kneels to tip
with an autograph.

When the bell tolls round two, I face a Mailer who has with herculean effort
quickly calmed himself. He has sucked in his cheeks for control and
looks, for the moment, like a tubercular housewife. I see immediately that he
has beaten back the demiurge. We will stay in the realms of the intellect. His
gloves are completely laced and his steps are tight and full of control. He dances over to the ropes and beckons me with an open glove to taste his
newness.

Who do you think I am, Norm? Didn’t I travel half a world with no hope
of writing a book about it to watch Ali lure George Foreman to the ropes? Not for me, Norm, is your coy ease along the top strand. I’ll wait and take you in the open. You see, I learned more than you did in Africa. While you holed up in an air-conditioned hotel and resurrected those eight rounds for your half a million advance, I thumbed my way to what was once called Biafra. I went to the cemetery where Dick Tiger lies dead of causes unknown at age thirty-five in newly prosperous Nigeria. How did you miss Dick Tiger? You who were the first white negro, you the crown prince of nigger-lovers, you missed the ace of the jungle. Yes, he was the heart of the dark continent, the Aristotle of Africa. A middleweight and a revolutionary. While you clowned around with Torres and Ali and Emile Griffith, Tiger packed his gear and headed home to see what he could pick clean from the starvation and the slaughter. He went home to face bad times and bad people and was dead a week after his plane touched down. Where were you and the sportswriters, Norm, when Dick Tiger needed you? I at least made the trek to the resting
place of the hero, and it was there in the holy calm of his forgotten tomb that I vowed to come back and make my move. No one offered me a penny {{pg|511|512}} for “The Dick Tiger Story” as told to me, so you won’t get it now either. Come out to the middle, Norm. No, you’re still coy, relaxed; well, two can play that
one.

I sit down in the corner opposite him; I fan myself with the mouthpiece.
To the audience it looks as if we’re kidding. He sloping against the ropes, I twenty-five feet away pretending I’m at a picnic in the English countryside. Real fight fans know what’s up. There is only a certain amount of available energy. In the universe it’s called entropy; in the ring it is known as “ppf,” punches per flurry. Neither of us has the strength at this moment to muster the necessary ten to twelve ppf’s to really damage the other. Fighters trained in the Golden Gloves or various homes for juvenile delinquents will go through the motions anyway. They will stalk and butt and sweat upon each other. But Mailer and I, knowing the score, wait out the round. Archie Moore leafs through the Texas Boxing Commission rules. Some fans boo, others take advantage of the lull to refresh themselves.

For me, every second is a victory. Round by round I wear the laurel and the bay. Who thought I could even last the first? Five will get me tenure, seven and I’ll be a dean. Yes, I can wait, Norm, until you come to me in midring
with all that bulk and experience. Come to me with your strength, your
wisdom, your compassion, and your insight. This time at the bell we are
both giggling, aware each to each of the resined canvas upon which we paint our destinies.

I walk over to his corner where he sits on his stool, kingly again, not hurt as he was after round one. He offers me a drink from his green bottle. We spit into the same bucket. I know his seconds don’t like me coming over there between rounds. Poirier turns away but Norman smiles, cuffs me playfully behind the neck. Together we walk out to await the bell.

For twice three minutes we have traveled the same turf. Ambition and
gravity have held us in a dialectical encounter, but as round three begins, Mailer’s old friend the irrational joins us. No matter that I actually see the
pig-tailed form of my sister beckoning me between mouthfuls of popcorn to rush at you. Aeneas, Hector, Dick Tiger, they too saw the phantoms that promise the sunshine and delight after one quick lunge. My sister is nine years old. She wears a gingham dress. She is right there beside you, close
enough for Archie to stumble on.

“Watch out, kid,” I say, “you shouldn’t even be here.” “It’s okay,” Mailer says. “She has my permission.”{{pg|512|513}}
She throws the empty popcorn box over the ropes. “Please take me home,” she whimpers, and as she stands there the power enters me, the ppf quotient floods my own soul, and I rush, not in fear, not in anger, but in full sweet confidence, I rush with both fists to the middle of Norman Mailer.

First my left with all its quixotic force and then my sure and solid right lands in the valley of his solar plexus. Next my head in a raw, cruel butt joins
the piston arms. Hands, arms, head, neck, back, legs. As a boy for the first time shakes the high dive in the presence of his parents, with such pride do
I dive. And with the power of falling human weight knifing through the chlorine-dark pool do I catapult. As a surgeon lays open flesh, indifferently, thinking not of tumors but of the arc of his raquet in full backswing, with
such professional ease am I engulfed.

I hear the wind leave his lungs. Like large soft earlobes, they shade me from the glare of his heart. The sound of his digestive juices is rhythmic and
I resonate to the music of his inner organs. I hear the liver weakened from drink but on key still, the gentle reek of kidneys, the questioning solo of pancreas, the harmonicalike appendix, all here all around me, and the cautionary
voice of my mother: “Be careful, little one, when you hit someone so
hard in the stomach. That’s how Houdini died.”

Somewhere else Archie Moore is counting ten over a prone loser. Judges are packing up scorecards and handbags snap shut. I am comfortable in the
damp prison of his rib cage. His blood explodes like little Hiroshimas every second.

“Concentrate,” says Mailer, “so the experience will not be wasted on you.”

“It’s hard,” I say, “amid the color and distraction.”

“I know,” says my gentle master, “but think about one big thing.”

I concentrate on the new edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. It works. My mind is less a palimpsest, more a blank page.

“You may be too young to remember,” he says, “James Jones and James T. Farrell and James Gould Cozzens and dozens like them. I took them all on, absorbed all they had and went on my way, just like Shakespeare ate up
''Tottel’s Miscellany''.”

“No lectures,” I gasp, “only truths.”

“I am the Twentieth Century,” Mailer says. “Go forth from here toward the east and earn your bread by the sweat of your brow. Never write another line
nor raise a fist to any man.” His words and his music are like Christmas
morning. I go forth, a seer.
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Inside Norman Mailer}}
[[Category:Short Stories (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Inside Norman Mailer

2025-04-02T01:56:21Z

Chelsey.brantley: Added paragraphs

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR04}}
{{Working}} 

{{Byline|last=Apple|first=Max|note=Reprinted by permission of the author, Max Apple. From {{cite book |last= |first= |date= |title=The Oranging of America |url= |location=New York |publisher=Viking |year=1976 |pages=49-60 |ref=harv }}|url=....}}

==I==
So what if I could kick the shit out of Truman Capote, and who really cares that once in a Newark bar, unknown to each other, I sprained the wrist of E. L. Doctorow in a harmless arm wrestle. For years I’ve kicked around in out-of-the-way places, sparred for a few bucks or just for kicks with the likes of Scrap Iron Johnson, Phil Rahv, Kenny Burke, and Chico Vejar. But, you know, I’m getting older too. When I feel the quick arthritic pains fly through my knuckles, I ask myself, Where are your poems and novels? Where are your long-limbed girls with cunts like tangerines? Yes, I’ve had a few successes. There are towns in America where people recognize me on the street and ask what I’m up to these days. ‘’I’m thirty-three,” I tell them, “in the top of my form. I’m up to the best. I’m up to Norman Mailer.”

They think I’m kidding, but the history of our game is speckled with the
unlikely. Look at Pete Rademacher—not even a pro. Fresh from a three-round Olympic decision, he got a shot at Floyd Patterson, made the cover of
''Sports Illustrated'', picked up an easy hundred grand. Now that is one fight
that Mr. Mailer, the literary lion, chose not to discuss. The clash between
pro and amateur didn’t grab his imagination like two spades in Africa or the
dark passion of Emile Griffith. Yes, you know how to pick your spots, Norman. I who have studied your moves think that your best instinct is judgment. It’s your secret punch. You knew how to stake out Kennedy and
Goldwater, but on the whole you kept arm’s length from Nixon. Humphrey
never earned you a dime.

Ali, the moon, scrappy broads, dirty walls, all meat to you, slugger. But {{pg|504|505}} even Norman Mailer has misplayed a few. Remember the Chassidic tales? The rabbi pose was one you couldn’t quite pull off, but you cut your losses fast, the mark of a real pro, and I fully expect that you’ll come back to that one yet to cash in big on theology. Maybe at sixty you’ll throw a birthday party for yourself in the Jerusalem Hilton. You’ll roll up in an ancient scroll, grow earlocks, and say, “This is the big one, the one I’ve been waiting for.” With Allen Ginsberg along on a leash you’ll clank through the holy cities living on nuts and distilled water and sell your films as a legitimate appendix to the New Testament.

If I had the patience I’d wait for that religious revival and be your Boswell, then I’d drive off that whole crew of trainers and seconds who tag after you, but by then I’ll be almost fifty and maybe too slow to do you justice. As the rabbis said: “Reputation is a meal, energy a food stamp.” It’s ''toches affen tisch'', you understand that, big boy? I’m spotting you seventy pounds, a dozen books, wives, children, memories, millions in the bank. My weapons are desperation, neglect, and bad form. I am the C student in a mediocre college, the madman in the crowd, the quaint gunman who rides into Dodge City because he’s heard they have good restaurants. We share only a mutual desire to let it all take place in public, in the open. This is the way Mailer has always played it, this I learned from you. Why envy from afar when I can pummel you in a lighted ring. Your reputation makes it possible. You who are composed of genes and risks, you appreciate the wildness of strangers. Anyway, you think you’ll nail me in one.

While I, for months, have been running fifteen miles a day and eating
natural food, you train by scratching your nuts with a soft rubber eraser. You take walks in the moonlight and turn the clichés inside out. For you they make way. Sidewalks tilt, lovers quarrel. People whisper your name to each other, give you wholesale prices and numerous gifts. An “Okay” from Norman Mailer makes a career. Power like this there has not been since Catullus in old Rome carried on his instep Caesar’s daughter.

I’ll give you this much: you have come by it honestly. Not by bribery and not by marriage, not by family ties and not by wealth, not by good luck alone or by the breaks of the game. You have plenty, Slugger, that I’ll admit. But I do not come at you like a barbarian. The latest technology is in my corner. The Schick 1000-watt blow-dryer, trunks by Haspel, robe by Mr. Mann, Jovan cologne. Adidas kidskin shoes travel three quarters of my shin with laces of mandarin silk. From my flesh, coated with Vaseline and Desenex, {{pg|505|506}} the sweat breaks forth like pearls. My desperation grows muscular in the bright lights. I am the fatted calf.

You stand in your corner like Walt Whitman. No electric outlets, cheap
cotton YMCA trunks, even your gloves look used. Your red robe just says “Norm.” You wear sneakers and no socks. I should take you the Oriental way by working your feet up to blisters and then stepping on your toes, but I lack the Chinaman’s patience. No, it will have to be head to head, although everyone has cautioned me about trading punches with you.

Last week a crowd of critics came out to my camp in a chartered bus.
They carried canes and magnifying glasses. They told me to evaluate each
punch from the shoulder. “Let your elbow be the judge,” Robert Penn Warren said; “Sting like an irony,” from Booth of Chicago. They told me that if I win I’ll get an honorary degree from Kenyon and a job at one of the best gyms in the Midwest. Like a Greek chorus they stood beside my training ring and sang in unison, “Don’t slug it out, move and think. Speed and reflexes beat out power. To the victor goes the victory.”

“Scram.” I yelled, spitting my between-the-rounds mouthwash. “Get lost you crummy bastards. You shit on my poems and laughed off my stories,
now you want some of my body language. Go study the ambiguities of
Harold Robbins.” I was mad as hell but they stood firm taking notes on my weight and reach. Finally a group of kids carrying “Free Rubin Carter” signs ran them back to the bus.

The press is no help either. They are so tired of promoting Ali against a bunch of nobodies that to them I’m just another Joe Bugner. They rarely call me by name. “Mailer’s latest victim to be” is their tag. The ''Times'' calls me a “man with little to recommend him. Slight. almost feline, with the gestures of a minor poet, this latest in a long series of Mailer baiters seems to have no more business in the ring with the master than Stan Ketchel had with Jack Johnson.No one is interested in this fight. The Astrodome will be bare, UHF refuses to televise, and Mailer has scheduled a reading for later that night at the University of Houston. Norman, why do you keep accepting every challenge from the peanut gallery? Let’s stop this Christians versus Lions until there is a real contender. Now, if the Pynchon backers could come up with a site and a solid guarantee, that might be a real match.”

You know what I say, I say, “Fuck the ''Times''.” They gave Clay no chance
against Big Bad Sonny Liston, and four years later the “meanest, toughest” {{pg|506|507}} champ the ''Times'' ever saw dropped dead while tying his shoes and Muhammad built a Temple for Elijah M. So much for the sports writers.

But there are a few people who understand. Teddy White will be in my corner and Senator Proxmire at ringside. ''The Realist'' and the L.A. ''Free Press'' have picked me. The DAR sent a fruit basket. Outside the literary crowd I’m actually well liked. Cesar Chavez and the migrants from South Texas are coming up to cheer for me and my friend Ira from Minneapolis and the whole English department of my school. All the Democratic Presidential candidates sent telegrams; so did Bill Buckley, Mayor Beame, Gore Vidal, Irving Wallace, John Ehrlichman, and Herman Kahn. . . . All I can say is, when the time comes boys, I’ll be ready, just watch.

==II==
Our first face-to-face meeting is at the weigh-in. He wanted to dispense with it and turn in a morning urine specimen instead. The boxing commission
put the nix on that idea. Oh, he knew who I was before the weigh-in. We had traded photos, autographs, and once I had anthologized him.
But face to face on either side of a big metal scale with our robes on and Teddy White rubbing my back while I stare bullets, that is something else
again.

He nods, I look away. He can afford to be gracious. If I win, I’ll make a
handsome donation to UNICEF in his honor. For now, I button my lip. He
chats with White about convention sites, claims that because of tonight he’ll have an insider’s if they do the ’76 one in the Astrodome.

I come in at one hundred forty-four and three quarters, thirty-four-inch reach. He is two hundred fourteen and a thirty-inch reach. He spots me the reach and eighteen years. I give him seventy pounds and a ton of reputation. He has enough grace under pressure to teach at a ballet school, but the smile discloses bad teeth. I’ll remember that. His body hairs are graying. I can see that he has not trained and could use sleep. My tongue lies at the bottom of my mouth. “Good luck, kid,” he says, but I have removed my contact lenses and only learn later that it was the Great One in a magnanimous gesture whom I snubbed because I had to take a leak.

==III==
The Dome is a half-empty cave. At the last minute they lowered all tickets to a buck, and thousands popped in to see the King. To me the crowd means {{pg|507|508}} nothing. It is as anonymous as the whir of an air conditioner. I stare at the
Everlast trademark on my gloves and practice keeping the mouthpiece in
without gagging. “Stay loose,” Teddy yells over the din, “stay loose as a goose
and box like a fox.”

I dance in my corner for three or four minutes before he appears. The crowd goes wild when that woolly head jogs up the ramp. He climbs through the ropes and goes to center ring. He throws kisses with both open gloves. He
is wearing the same YMCA trunks and cheap sneakers, but his robe is a threadbare terrycloth without a name. It looks like something he picked up at Goodwill on the way over. The crowd loves his slovenliness.

“To each his own,” I whisper to myself as I ask Teddy for a final hit with the blow-dryer. My curls are tight as iron; his hang like eggshells crowding around his ears. He throws a kiss to me; I try to return it with the finger but my glove makes it a hand.

The referee motions us to center ring. We both requested Ruby Goldstein
but the old pro wouldn’t come out of retirement for a match like this one. I then asked for the Brown Bomber and Mailer wanted Jersey Joe. Finally we compromised on Archie Moore, who has a goatee now and is wearing a yellow leisure suit as he calls us together for a review of the rules. I notice that he is wearing street shoes and think to protest, but I see that he needs the black patent pumps in order to make his trousers break at the step. A good sign, I think. Archie will be with me.

He goes over the mandatory eight count and the three-knockdown rule,
but Mailer and I ignore the words. Our eyes meet and mine are ready for
his. For countless hours I have trained before a mirror with his snapshot taped to the middle. I have had blown up to poster size that old ''Esquire'' pose of him in the ring, and I am ready for what I know will be the first real encounter. My eyes are steady on his. In the first few seconds I see boredom, I see sweet brown eyes that would open into yawning mouthlike cavities if they could. I see indifferent eyes and gay youthful glances. Checkbook eyes. Evelyn Wood eyes. Then suddenly he blinks and I have my first triumph. Fear pops out. Plain old unabashed fear. Not trembling, not panic, just a little fear. And I’ve found it in the eyes, exactly like the nineteenth-century writers used to before Mailer switched it to the asshole. I smile and he knows that I know. Anger replaces the fear but the edge is mine, big boy. All the sportswriters and oddsmakers haven’t lulled you. You know that every time you step into the ring it’s like going to the {{pg|508|509}} doctor with a slight cough that with a little twist of the DNA turns out to
be cancer. You, old cancermonger, you know this better than anyone. In
my small frame, in my gleaming slightly feline gestures you have smelled
the blood test, the chest x-ray, the specialist, the lies, the operations, the false hopes, the statistics. Yes, Norman, you looked at me or through me and in some distant future that maybe I carry in my hands like a telegram, there you glimpsed that old bugaboo and it went straight to your prostate, to your bladder, and to your heavy fingertips. In a second, Norm, you built me up. Oh, I have grown big on your fear. Giant killers have to so that they can reach up for the fatal stab to the heart.

No camera has recorded this. Nor has Archie Moore repeating his memorized monologue noted our exchange. Only you and I, Norm, understand.
This is as it should be. You have given dignity to my challenge; like a sovereign government you have recognized my hopeless revolutionary state
and turned me, in a blink, credible, at least to you, at least where it counts. I slap my fists together and at the bell I meet you for the first time as an equal.

==IV==
The problem now is as old as realism. You don’t want all the grunts, the
shortness of breath, the sound of leather on skin, and I don’t want to tell you in great detail. But it’s all there, the throwing of punches, the clinches, the head butting, the swelling of injured faces. If I forget to, then you put it in. For I am too busy taking the measure of my opponent to feel the slap of his glove against my flesh. The bell has moved us into a new field of force. We drop our pens. The spotlight is the glare of eternity, and what it has all come to is simply the matter of Truth. “Existentialist” I call him, spitting out my mouthpiece, though in practice I have recited Peter Piper a dozen times and kept the mouthpiece in. “Dated existentialist. Insincere existentialist.
Jewish existentialist . . . ” I hit him with this smooth combination, but he continues to rush me bearlike, serene, full of skill and power.

“Campy lightweight,” he yells, in full charge as I sidestep his rush and he
tangles his upper body in the ropes.

I come up behind, and as well as I can with the gross movement of the
glove I pull back his head and expose the blue gnarled cacophony of his neck.

“I am Abraham and you the ram caught in the thicket,” I announce from behind. “I have been an outcast in many lands, I bear the covenant, and you {{pg|509|510}} full of power and goatish lust, you carry the false demon out of whose curved horn I will blow my own triumph and salvation.”

“How unlike an Abraham thou art,” he responds, gasping from his entanglement in the ropes. “Where is thy son then and where thy handmaiden Hagar, whom thou so ungenerously got with a child of false promise and then discarded into the wilderness? Thou art an assumer of historical identities, a chameleon of literary pretension.”

I reach into the empty air for the sword of slaughter when Archie Moore separates us, rights Mailer, and warns me about hair pulling and exposing the
jugular of my opponent.

Now we stalk one another at center ring. He, not having trained, not having rested, not having regarded my challenge as serious, he is ready almost at once to revert to instinctive behavior. He wants it all animal now and tries
to bite off his glove so that he can come atme with ten fingers. But I am still in the airy realms of the mind. I see and discern his actions. How coarse appears the Mailer saliva upon his worn gloves, how disgusting his tongue and
crooked teeth as they nibble at the strings. His mouth has become as a loom with the glove lace moving between his teeth on the slow, feeble power of his
tongue.

“The Industrial Revolution,” I yell across the ring, and his gloves drop, his mouth is open and agape. I land a hard right to his jaw and feel the ligaments stretch. At the bell he is dazed and hurt. He moves to his corner like an old man in an unemployment line.

I stand in the middle of the ring and watch the slow shuffle toward comfort of this man whom most enlightened folks thought I could not withstand for even three minutes. So carefully have I trained, so honest has been
my fifteen miles of daily roadwork that the first round of exertion has
scarcely left me breathless. While Norman is in his corner swishing his
mouth, having his brow mopped, I am in mid-ring, stunned with my opening achievement. I have stayed a full round with him. I have seen the fear in his eyes and the beast in his soul. I have felt the heft of his sweating form in a heavy embrace. In the clinch, as our protective cups clicked against each other, there have I surmised his lust. For three metaphysical moments we two white men have embraced in violence while old black Archie pares his perfect fingernails in the midst of us.

“Don’t forget the game plan,” Teddy is yelling from my corner. He wants
my help in pulling the blackboard through the ropes. I come out of my {{pg|510|511}}reverie to help him. Oh, I have been waiting for this moment, and now but
for good old Teddy I might have forgotten. Like the most careful teacher printing large block letters for an eager second grade, I inscribe and turn to four sides so all can see, “The Naked and the Dead Is His Best Work.”

When Norman reads my inscription, he is swishing Gatorade in his
mouth while his second, Richard Poirier, applies with a Q-tip glycerine and rosewater to the Mailer lips. When my barb registers, he swallows the
Gatorade and bites the Q-tip in half. Poirier and José Torres can barely keep
him on his stool. They whisper frantically, each in an ear. Archie is across the ring getting a quick shine from a boy who manages, on tiptoe, to reach
with his buffing cloth up to the apron of the elevated ring. Arch kneels to tip
with an autograph.

When the bell tolls round two, I face a Mailer who has with herculean effort
quickly calmed himself. He has sucked in his cheeks for control and
looks, for the moment, like a tubercular housewife. I see immediately that he
has beaten back the demiurge. We will stay in the realms of the intellect. His
gloves are completely laced and his steps are tight and full of control. He dances over to the ropes and beckons me with an open glove to taste his
newness.

Who do you think I am, Norm? Didn’t I travel half a world with no hope
of writing a book about it to watch Ali lure George Foreman to the ropes? Not for me, Norm, is your coy ease along the top strand. I’ll wait and take you in the open. You see, I learned more than you did in Africa. While you holed up in an air-conditioned hotel and resurrected those eight rounds for your half a million advance, I thumbed my way to what was once called Biafra. I went to the cemetery where Dick Tiger lies dead of causes unknown at age thirty-five in newly prosperous Nigeria. How did you miss Dick Tiger? You who were the first white negro, you the crown prince of nigger-lovers, you missed the ace of the jungle. Yes, he was the heart of the dark continent, the Aristotle of Africa. A middleweight and a revolutionary. While you clowned around with Torres and Ali and Emile Griffith, Tiger packed his gear and headed home to see what he could pick clean from the starvation and the slaughter. He went home to face bad times and bad people and was dead a week after his plane touched down. Where were you and the sportswriters, Norm, when Dick Tiger needed you? I at least made the trek to the resting
place of the hero, and it was there in the holy calm of his forgotten tomb that I vowed to come back and make my move. No one offered me a penny {{pg|511|512}} for “The Dick Tiger Story” as told to me, so you won’t get it now either. Come out to the middle, Norm. No, you’re still coy, relaxed; well, two can play that
one.

I sit down in the corner opposite him; I fan myself with the mouthpiece.
To the audience it looks as if we’re kidding. He sloping against the ropes, I twenty-five feet away pretending I’m at a picnic in the English countryside. Real fight fans know what’s up. There is only a certain amount of available energy. In the universe it’s called entropy; in the ring it is known as “ppf,” punches per flurry. Neither of us has the strength at this moment to muster the necessary ten to twelve ppf’s to really damage the other. Fighters trained in the Golden Gloves or various homes for juvenile delinquents will go through the motions anyway. They will stalk and butt and sweat upon each other. But Mailer and I, knowing the score, wait out the round. Archie Moore leafs through the Texas Boxing Commission rules. Some fans boo, others take advantage of the lull to refresh themselves.

For me, every second is a victory. Round by round I wear the laurel and the bay. Who thought I could even last the first? Five will get me tenure, seven and I’ll be a dean. Yes, I can wait, Norm, until you come to me in midring
with all that bulk and experience. Come to me with your strength, your
wisdom, your compassion, and your insight. This time at the bell we are
both giggling, aware each to each of the resined canvas upon which we paint our destinies.

I walk over to his corner where he sits on his stool, kingly again, not hurt as he was after round one. He offers me a drink from his green bottle. We spit into the same bucket. I know his seconds don’t like me coming over there between rounds. Poirier turns away but Norman smiles, cuffs me playfully behind the neck. Together we walk out to await the bell.

For twice three minutes we have traveled the same turf. Ambition and
gravity have held us in a dialectical encounter, but as round three begins, Mailer’s old friend the irrational joins us. No matter that I actually see the
pig-tailed form of my sister beckoning me between mouthfuls of popcorn to rush at you. Aeneas, Hector, Dick Tiger, they too saw the phantoms that promise the sunshine and delight after one quick lunge. My sister is nine years old. She wears a gingham dress. She is right there beside you, close
enough for Archie to stumble on.

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Inside Norman Mailer}}
[[Category:Short Stories (MR)]]