The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Jive-Ass Aficionado: Why Are We in Vietnam? and Hemingway's Moral Code: Difference between revisions

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 <blockquote>On and on they go for half an hour, talking so close that D.J.
 can even get familiar with Rusty’s breath which is all right.It got
-a hint of middle-aged fatigue of twenty years of doing all the lit�tle things body did not want to do, that flat sour of the slightly
+a hint of middle-aged fatigue of twenty years of doing all the little things body did not want to do, that flat sour of the slightly
 used up, and there’s a hint of garlic or onion, and tobacco, and
 twenty years of booze gives a little permanent rot to the odor
 coming off the lining of the stomach. . . . (133)
 {{pg|197 #|198 #}}
+That the multiple voices and structure of ''Why Are We in Vietnam''? derive from ''In Our Time'' seems even more likely when one considers Mailer’s ending. Curiously, like Hemingway, Mailer also breaks his final narrative installment—Chapters Ten and Eleven—into two, although there is no logical reason for doing so. The tenth chapter ends, “And the boys slept” (197); the eleventh begins, “And woke up in three hours. And it was black, and the fire near to out” (199), in what is most probably a reference to Hemingway’s narrative divisions for “Big-Two Hearted River”—inexplicable to the reading public unless, of course, one considers Hemingway’s desire to incorporate all of the vignettes from ''in our time''. Here, Mailer apparently has a little joke at Hemingway’s expense, breaking up the narrative but then actually drawing attention to the break by juxtaposing the two chapters with no Intro Beep between them, using conjunctions to show they should or could have been one, and positioning the final Intro Beep at the very end of the novel, the way that Hemingway ended his book. By so doing, Mailer engages in an intertextual dialogue with his literary “papa,” as he does with other literary forebears in the interlocutory sections.
+It is in the Intro Beeps where Mailer situates his attempts at creating a
+new American fictional voice by invoking the book that Hemingway said
+begat modern American fiction—Mark Twain’s ''Huckleberry Finn'' (Hemingway, ''Green Hills'' 23)—which D.J. talks about in Intro Beep . The next
+major, irreverent young voice in American fiction was undoubtedly Holden
+Caulfield, J.D. Salinger’s hero from ''The Catcher in the Rye,'' to whom D.J. refers in Intro Beep 2, along with “Call me Ishmael” Melville (Mailer, ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' 26). With these references, Mailer obviously was drawing attention to young D.J. as a new American Adam with a new and distinctive voice that, like his predecessors, questions or indicts current society for its misguided thinking and behavior.
+Just as Hemingway opted for irony in his title—Philip Young suggests the
+likelihood that In Our Time is a “sardonic allusion to a well-known phrase
+from the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer: ‘Give peace in our
+time, O Lord’” (5)—Mailer took the title of an address that President Lyndon Johnson gave at Johns Hopkins University in the spring of 1965 (“Why We Are inVietnam”), in which Johnson presented his case for American involvement, then turned Johnson’s explanatory title into a question . . .which, of course, it was becoming by the spring of 1966 when Mailer began ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' Why was America in Vietnam, and more importantly,
+{{pg|198 #|199 #}}
+why would there be, at the time Mailer was inspired to write this novel, still such flag-waving support for Johnson’s war?
+As historian John Hellman reports, it begins earlier, during the presidency of John F. Kennedy, whose “well-publicized interest in the Special Forces made them extensions of the commander-in-chief, just as the Hunters of Kentucky and the Rough Riders had once magnified the respective images of Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt” (44). Hellman identified the Green beret as a “contemporary reincarnation of the western hero” who
+“personified the combined virtues of civilization and savagery without any
+of their respective limitations” (45-46)—which helps to explain why the
+bestselling novel to come out of the Vietnam War era wasn’t any of the realistic accounts that generated support for the anti-war movement, but rather Robin Moore’s ''The Green Berets,'' published in 1965. This flag-waving novel that lionized the Special Forces reached Number 5 on the bestseller list in hardcover, and when it appeared in paperback that same year, “buyers at drugstore racks made it what ''80 Years of Best-Sellers'' calls‘ the phenomenon of the year, with 1,200,000 printed in only two months,’” Hellman writes. It inspired former Green Beret Barry Sadler to record his “Ballad of the Green Berets,” which vaulted to Number 1 on the Billboard charts and “reportedly induced so many enlistments of young men hoping to become Green Berets that the Selective Service was able to suspend draft calls during the first four months of 1966” (Hellman 53).