The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Exhuming Mailer’s America

Written by
K. D. Norris

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Abstract: The first book of The Armies of the Night, “History as a Novel,” is a personal account of Mailer’s involvement in the protest as part of a platoon of American social leaders and literati, including Noam Chomsky, Benjamin Spock, Robert Lowell, Paul Goodman, Marcus Raskin, and Dwight McDonald. Through Mailer’s eyes, but told in a masterfully unsettling third-person perspective viewing everything, including the character of Mailer, we are swept up by the ethos and bounce off the egos of the protesters. For the first time, for some readers, many of these historic counterculture figures are given flesh and blood, if not realism.

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URL: https://prmlr.us/mr08norr

Norman Mailer who marched unabashed and unafraid through the 1960’s American counterculture and assailed our literary senses throughout his life, is probably cursing in his grave—and, oh, what colorfully foul words he knew how to use.

Given our achingly ambivalent generation of I-Pod-people, we could use more abrasive voices like his today.

Recently, Mailer’s The Armies of the Night became the latest selection from my unread library. He followed Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Mailer’s 1968 book had stood forlorn on my shelf for 20 years, since I left Humboldt State University with my journalism degree. I don’t remember when or how I gained possession of the book; evidently someone, maybe me, thought it a good book for a journalist to read. It was and still is.

Armies is more than simply a refresher course on what quality “new” journalism is all about. Exhuming Mailer also triggered somber speculation that my America has atrophied since the 1960s, when thousands of people put their intellectual and corporal capital at risk to protest a failed military venture by a failed national leader, when the American middle class saw, understood, and rose up.

The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel/The Novel as History—is really two books in one: a personal history and a semi-journalistic account of the Oct. 20, 1967 public protest when demonstrators marched on the Pentagon to oppose the Vietnam War. The scene was later made cinematically famous in Forrest Gump (only a Jeopardy geek would probably know that fact).

The Armies of the Night won both a Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction and the National Book Award. There is no doubt that Mailer was a superb writer when he wanted to be. But I am confident that my random selection of Armies allowed me to see this fact unobstructed by the self-referential, salty language, and rough themes that dominate some of his other works.

Armies’ first book, lion’s share and literary meat, is “History as a Novel,” a personal account of Mailer’s involvement in the protest as part of a platoon of American social leaders and literati, including Noam Chomsky, Benjamin Spock, Robert Lowell, Paul Goodman, Marcus Raskin and Dwight McDonald. We see Mailer at pre-protest discussions, walking in mass protest, arrested and spending a night in jail. (He and his fellow notables decided, over drinks the night before, that they needed to get arrested so as to keep the mass media from labeling the protesters as just “hippies” and “student radicals.”) Through Mailer’s eyes, but told in a masterfully unsettling third person perspective viewing everything, including the character of Mailer, we are swept up by the ethos and bounce off the egos of the protesters. For the first time, for me, many of these historic counterculture figures are given flesh and blood, if not realism.

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Works Cited

• Gilman, Richard (8 June 1968). "What Mailer Has Done". The New Republic. Books and the Arts. pp. 27–31.
• Mailer, Norman (1968). The Armies of the Night. New York: NAL.