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

Written by
James Plath

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Abstract: An analysis of the influence of Hemingway on Norman Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam? It is Mailer and D.J.’s adoption of the Hipster mind-set and way of talking that sets them apart from others, even more so than the hunter’s code of honor. And being an insider—someone who knows what the outside world can only imagine—is perhaps the most crucial element of aficion, as Hemingway detailed it.

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In Why Are We in Vietnam? Norman Mailer alludes to James Joyce twice (126, 149), and certainly his 1967 anti-war novel has a Joycean feel. It incorporates the same sort of monologic stream-of-consciousness narrative and language play as we saw in Ulysses, all tinged with the “color” that put "Ulysses" on trial in America for obscenity. But Mailer’s novel is also richly evocative of that other great modernist writer, Ernest Hemingway.

Hemingway was conspicuously singled-out with a few adjectives when Mailer told an interviewer six years earlier that if he has “one ambition above all others, it is to write a novel which Dostoevsky and Marx; Joyce and Freud; Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust and Spengler; Faulkner, and even old moldering Hemingway might come to read” (Conversations 76).A close reading reveals that Why Are We in Vietnam? may actually be that novel, but I’ll leave it to future critics to explore how it would have appealed to the sensibilities of the other writers mentioned. I’m going to focus on Hemingway, because apart from echoes of Joyce’s style, his influence here seems most prevalent.

As Laura Adams observes, “three of the most powerful influences on Mailer’s scheme of things have been war and Ernest Hemingway and the intersection of the two” (173). Mailer told an interviewer that Hemingway’s death made him feel “a little weaker” (Conversations 71), no doubt because he had felt a connection. Like Hemingway, Mailer wrote about boxing, he wrote about bullfighting, he talked tough, he hung out with tough friends, he went to war, he wrote about war, he backed the underdog, he infuriated feminist#|195#}} take special delight in writing fiction that shocked readers or showcased his “insider” knowledge. “Hemingway and Fitzgerald are important imaginative figures in my life,” Mailer told the Washington Post Book World in 1971, explaining that “in Hemingway and Fitzgerald, it’s the sensuous evocation of things. The effect on the gut is closer to poetry” (Conversations 189).

Why Are We in Vietnam? Mailer seems to have borrowed a number of things from Hemingway, including the narrative structure for the novel, Hemingway’s “iceberg theory” of omission, the attempt to make the reader actually experience the fiction in his “gut,” and thematic elements that reflect the code and code heroes that Robert Penn Warren and Philip Young recognized during the early years of Hemingway scholarship.

In the spring of 1924 Hemingway had written the lower-case in our time, which consisted of eighteen vignettes drawn from the young writer’s journalistic observations of political upheaval, war, and bullfighting, published in an edition of only 170 copies. For In Our Time (1925), which was released by a major publisher in a first edition of 1,335 copies, he elevated two of those vignettes to stories and used the other sixteen as interlocutory chapters inserted in front of each of the longer new stories that he had crafted, most of which involved a coming-of-age protagonist named Nick Adams. To solve the problem of having an extra vignette, Hemingway broke the last story—“Big Two-Hearted River”—into Parts I and II. Interestingly, as Michael Reynolds reminds, Hemingway later said he always intended the vignettes to function as “chapter headings,” explaining, “‘You get the close up very quietly but absolutely solid and the real thing but very close, and then through it all between every story comes the rhythm of the in our time chapters’” (qtd. in Reynolds 233). As Hemingway further clarified for critic Edmund Wilson, his intent was to “give the picture of the whole between examining it in detail” (Hemingway, Ernest 128).

That’s exactly how Why Are We in Vietnam? is structured with similar effects that it has on the reader. Just as Hemingway’s short stories focused onNick and the personal lives of people “in his time,”while the vignettes served as newspaper-headline reminders of the violent, larger world that was affecting individual psyches, so, too, Mailer’s highly personalized and detailed narrative of sixteen-year-old D.J.’s hunting trip with his father, his father’s business associates, and his best friend Tex in the rugged Brooks Range of Alaska is intercut with “Intro Beeps” that serve the same function and add “rhythm” as did Hemingway’s vignettes. The chapters in Why Are We in

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Vietnam? focus on the story of the hunting trip, while the Intro Beeps are digressively vocal tour de forces that give Mailer the chance to evoke a broader world by allowing D.J. the freedom to rant about things outside the constraints of narrative. For one thing, the Intro Beeps feature the narrator as an eighteen-year-old, so there is a broader prospective already involved. D.J. at eighteen is wiser than D.J. at sixteen, who is recalled in the main narrative. In the Intro Beeps D.J. thinks and “speaks” in an even more pronounced stream-of-consciousness while at a dinner party his parents throw for him the night before he and Tex are scheduled to ship out to fight in Vietnam. It is in these numbered Intro Beeps where D.J., unfettered by storytelling, can rant and ramble about more general and abstract topics like the teachings of Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian philosopher who warned that the media and the constant bombardment of pop culture messages would have a deleterious effect on the human condition (Mailer, Why Are We in Vietnam? 8). It is these big-picture concerns that surface mostly in the Intro Beeps and do indeed remind the reader of a world outside the hunting narrative of the novel, just as listening to a radio dee-jay makes one aware of the source and also other listeners—a “broadcast” that is simultaneously reaching a larger world. And that in itself can be unsettling. “As D.J. suggests,” one critic observes, “society acts as a kind ofsuccubus upon the unconscious of Americans so that ‘you never know what vision has been humping you through the night’” (Wenke 123).

Although the white noise of media forms a powerful current that runs through the whole of D.J.’s Intro Beeps, the young narrator also weaves in his musings about bullfighting, machismo, existential dread, and Freudian theories on the centrality of sex and sexual issues. It is also in these Intro Beeps where Mailer teases readers by having D.J. insist, as early as Beep 4, that he may not be a white, young, and virile genius from Texas after all—maybe he’s really the voice of Black America:

I, D.J., am trapped in a Harlem head which has gone so crazy

that I think I am sitting at a banquet in the Dallas ass white-ass manse remembering Alaska am in fact a figment of a Spade gone ape in the mind from outrageous frustrates wasting him and so now living in an imaginary white brain. . . .(Mailer, Why Are We in Vietnam? 58)

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As Adams notes,“Although D.J. can ‘see right through shit’[49], he is not emancipated (he is only a ‘presumptive philosopher’[93], and the reader has no alternative but to confront the narrative’s white noise” (127). Hemingway famously remarked, “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it” (Hemingway, Conversations 128). Though D.J. has enough “radar” to make connections between corporate power,“yes men,” sexual acts, hunting, power-brokering, commercialism, and politics, he seems as affected by society’s white noise as he hopes his own “broadcasts” will be on readers, listeners, anyone within psychic earshot. And his voice deliberately shifts so many times that it is hard for anyone to get a “fix” on him. Hemingway’s In Our Time, not coincidentally, produced a similar effect. Michael Reynolds puts it best: “Eliot used so many voices in The Wasteland that it was hard to say when he was speaking. When Hemingway finished in our time, he achieved something of the same effect” (125). The same is true with D.J., whose narrative voice encompasses a disc jockey’s Hipster talk and bemused take on society, philosophical riffs from a deep thinker, more standard narration, and anger-fueled rants that suggest a disturbed side we suspect will come out in full flower once D.J. finds himself in Vietnam: “That’s how they talk in the East, up in those bone Yankee ass Jew circumcised prick Wall Street palaces—take it from D.J.—he got psychic transistors in his ear (one more gift of the dying griz) which wingding on all-out pickup each set of transcontinental dialogues from the hearts of the prissy-assed and the prigged. Fungatz, radatz, and back to piss” (Mailer, Why Are We in Vietnam? 151). Yet, the more he gets close to his father or describes the hunt in detail, the more D.J. settles into a less provocative, more evocative narration that comes closer to a standard issue voice, if there is such a thing:

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 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)

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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,

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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).

If Mailer found such early support for the war maddening, in this antiwar novel he again takes his cue from Hemingway, whose famous “iceberg theory” dictated, “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them” (Hemingway, Death 192). Hemingway felt that the writing becomes more powerful by omitting things you know, and the quintessential examples of the theory in practice are to be found in the short story “Hills Like White Elephants,” in which a couple avoids talk of a pregnancy and abortion, and the final story from In Our Time. Of “Big Two-Hearted River, Pts. I & II,”Hemingway wrote, “The Story was about coming back from the war but there was no mention of the war in it” (Moveable 76). Nick is a young veteran who not only finds no hero’s welcome; his favorite wilderness fishing area looks like a war zone, blackened by fire. And that

external devastation mirrors the interior landscape of his war-ravaged soul. No mention of the war is necessary.

Mailer accomplishes nearly the same thing by titling his book with a blunt question and then appearing to avoid it for the length of the entire narrative. “Vietnam” is mentioned only once in the book . . . and on the final page, in the final sentence. It is almost as if the character of D.J. took on a life of his own and steamrolled in whatever direction his voice could take him, and to whatever end. The mention of the word is, in fact, so shocking by the time we hear it that it almost has the feel of authorial intrusion. And Mailer was well aware of the gap that could be created between a strong fictional character living in the text and the author himself. As he wrote in an essay on “Miller and Hemingway”:

[I]f we take The Sun Also Rises as the purest example of a book whose protagonist created the precise air of a time and a place,

even there we come to the realization that Hemingway at the time he wrote it could not have been equal to Jake Barnes—he had created a consciousness wiser, drier, purer, more classic, more sophisticated and more graceful than his own. He was still gauche in relation to his creation. (Pieces 91)

Partly that is because Hemingway, through his narrative personae, was determined not to describe “or depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that . . . you actually experience the thing” (Hemingway, Ernest 153). Laura Adams was the first to see a similar technique at work in Why Are We in Vietnam?, although she stopped short of drawing the connection to Hemingway in identifying the “radical promise” of Mailer’s novel, which is that the reader will not only receive an adequate account of the way things are in America (“know what it’s all about”), but also experience at the level of sensibility remission from the cultural plague that is “an ultimate disease against which all other diseases are in design to protect us” (Adams 124). Adams concludes, in language that makes us think of Hemingway’s goals, “The radicalized or ‘shamanized’ reader, whose silence has been rewarded, participates in Mailer’s attempt to reintegrate the old, now suppressed, human circuitry with the baneful new” (124). And this happens, as it does in Hemingway, through detailed description and a compelling new narrative voice. As one critic astutely observes, D.J. makes us experience the