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{{DISPLAYTITLE:Norman Mailer: ''Miami and the Siege of Chicago''}} | {{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">''The Mailer Review''/Volume 2, 2008/</span>Norman Mailer: ''Miami and the Siege of Chicago''}} | ||
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{{byline|last=Hitchens|first=Christopher|note=Christopher Hitchens assesses Mailer’s masterful account of the tensions and turmoil that took place forty years ago when Republicans and Democrats met in Miami and Chicago to select their presidential nominees. ''Miami and the Siege of Chicago'' was first published in 1968 and reissued earlier this year by ''New York Review Books''. A version of this essay first appeared in the ''Atlantic''.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr08hitc}} | {{byline|last=Hitchens|first=Christopher|note=Christopher Hitchens assesses Mailer’s masterful account of the tensions and turmoil that took place forty years ago when Republicans and Democrats met in Miami and Chicago to select their presidential nominees. ''Miami and the Siege of Chicago'' was first published in 1968 and reissued earlier this year by ''New York Review Books''. A version of this essay first appeared in the ''Atlantic''.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr08hitc}} | ||
“I am a ‘left conservative’.” That was Norman Mailer’s jaunty but slightly defensive self-description when first I met him at the beginning of the 1980s. At the time, I was inclined to attribute this glibness (as I thought of it) to the triumph of middle age and to the compromises perhaps necessary to negotiate the then-new ascendancy of Ronald Reagan. But, looking back over this extraordinary journal of a plague year, written forty years ago, I suddenly appreciate that Mailer in 1968 had already been rehearsing for some kind of ideological synthesis, and discovering it in the most improbable of places. | {{dc|dc=“I| am a ‘left conservative’.”}} That was Norman Mailer’s jaunty but slightly defensive self-description when first I met him at the beginning of the 1980s. At the time, I was inclined to attribute this glibness (as I thought of it) to the triumph of middle age and to the compromises perhaps necessary to negotiate the then-new ascendancy of Ronald Reagan. But, looking back over this extraordinary journal of a plague year, written forty years ago, I suddenly appreciate that Mailer in 1968 had already been rehearsing for some kind of ideological synthesis, and discovering it in the most improbable of places. | ||
Party conventions have been such dull spectacles of stage-management for so long that this year (I happen to be writing on the day after the closing Democratic primaries) it has been considered nothing less than shocking that delegates might arrive in Denver in August with any more than ceremonial or coronational duties ahead of them. The coverage of such media-events, now almost wholly annexed by the cameras and those who serve them, has undergone a similar declension into insipidity. Mailer could see this coming: having left the Republican gathering in Miami slightly too early “he realized he had missed the most exciting night of the convention, at least on the floor, and was able to console himself only with the sad knowledge that he could cover it better on television than if he had been there.” This wasn’t quite true yet: what we have here is the last of the great political-convention essayists, and the close of a tradition that crested with H. L. Mencken and was caught so deftly in Gore Vidal’s play ''The Best Man''. You will note the way in which Mailer decided to write about himself in the third person, using for a title the name “the reporter.” This isn’t invariably a good idea but it generally works in this instance, even when Mailer muses, of himself, that: “The Democratic Convention in 1960 in Los Angeles which nominated John F. Kennedy, and the Republican in San Francisco in 1964 which installed Barry Goldwater, had encouraged some of his very best writing.” | Party conventions have been such dull spectacles of stage-management for so long that this year (I happen to be writing on the day after the closing Democratic primaries) it has been considered nothing less than shocking that delegates might arrive in Denver in August with any more than ceremonial or coronational duties ahead of them. The coverage of such media-events, now almost wholly annexed by the cameras and those who serve them, has undergone a similar declension into insipidity. Mailer could see this coming: having left the Republican gathering in Miami slightly too early “he realized he had missed the most exciting night of the convention, at least on the floor, and was able to console himself only with the sad knowledge that he could cover it better on television than if he had been there.” This wasn’t quite true yet: what we have here is the last of the great political-convention essayists, and the close of a tradition that crested with H. L. Mencken and was caught so deftly in Gore Vidal’s play ''The Best Man''. You will note the way in which Mailer decided to write about himself in the third person, using for a title the name “the reporter.” This isn’t invariably a good idea but it generally works in this instance, even when Mailer muses, of himself, that: “The Democratic Convention in 1960 in Los Angeles which nominated John F. Kennedy, and the Republican in San Francisco in 1964 which installed Barry Goldwater, had encouraged some of his very best writing.” | ||
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Could that gifted but gruesome twosome of Burroughs and Genet help to explain Mailer’s recurrence to the threat of “nihilism”? He hated the war and the police and had contempt for the mobbed-up big mayors and union men who constituted the muscle of the Democrats. But he found Eugene McCarthy brittle and dislikeable, and McCarthy supporters addicted to defeat. Then there was this: “He liked his life. He wanted it to go on, which meant that he wanted America to go on — not as it was going, not Vietnam — but what price was he really willing to pay?” Mailer here was being plaintive but honest, as in the case of the above account of his Lincoln Park funk. It was becoming another of those moments where the best lacked all conviction while the worst . . . well, we know how that goes. Incidentally, one can’t be too careful about making familiar poetic citations. Mailer quotes Edward Kennedy as saying of Bobby’s supporters that they had “followed him, honored him, lived in his mild and magnificent eye,” and one suddenly realizes that he thinks he is quoting Teddy himself rather than Robert Browning’s famous lines from ''The Lost Leader''. As Joan Didion once observed, there are those who say “No Man Is an Island” who firmly believe that they are echoing Ernest Hemingway. | Could that gifted but gruesome twosome of Burroughs and Genet help to explain Mailer’s recurrence to the threat of “nihilism”? He hated the war and the police and had contempt for the mobbed-up big mayors and union men who constituted the muscle of the Democrats. But he found Eugene McCarthy brittle and dislikeable, and McCarthy supporters addicted to defeat. Then there was this: “He liked his life. He wanted it to go on, which meant that he wanted America to go on — not as it was going, not Vietnam — but what price was he really willing to pay?” Mailer here was being plaintive but honest, as in the case of the above account of his Lincoln Park funk. It was becoming another of those moments where the best lacked all conviction while the worst . . . well, we know how that goes. Incidentally, one can’t be too careful about making familiar poetic citations. Mailer quotes Edward Kennedy as saying of Bobby’s supporters that they had “followed him, honored him, lived in his mild and magnificent eye,” and one suddenly realizes that he thinks he is quoting Teddy himself rather than Robert Browning’s famous lines from ''The Lost Leader''. As Joan Didion once observed, there are those who say “No Man Is an Island” who firmly believe that they are echoing Ernest Hemingway. | ||
Our Democratic primaries are run the way they are now mainly because of the way they were run then. Mailer dryly watched the roll-call in Chicago and noted that the state which put Hubert Humphrey over the top (Pennsylvania) was the one where McCarthy had received ninety per cent of the primary votes. To touch on another comparison with today’s politics, Mailer also noticed in Miami that Nixon had won the nomination in such a way as to also win the election: in other words without splitting or embittering his party. These and similar reflections are of interest and value in a year where the Democratic nominee is, in one of his many protean incarnations, a Chicago South Side operator with a wife whose father was a Daley precinct captain, while the Republican candidate is a repository of something in which almost nobody in 1968 would ever have believed: America’s residual pride about its own valor in Vietnam. The almost-closing line of the book is the prediction that Mailer wishes he had made to Eugene McCarthy’s daughter: | Our Democratic primaries are run the way they are now mainly because of the way they were run then. Mailer dryly watched the roll-call in Chicago and noted that the state which put Hubert Humphrey over the top (Pennsylvania) was the one where McCarthy had received ninety per cent of the primary votes. To touch on another comparison with today’s politics, Mailer also noticed in Miami that Nixon had won the nomination in such a way as to also win the election: in other words without splitting or embittering his party. These and similar reflections are of interest and value in a year where the Democratic nominee is, in one of his many protean incarnations, a Chicago South Side operator with a wife whose father was a Daley precinct captain, while the Republican candidate is a repository of something in which almost nobody in 1968 would ever have believed: America’s residual pride about its own valor in Vietnam. The almost-closing line of the book is the prediction that Mailer wishes he had made to Eugene McCarthy’s daughter: {{" '}}Dear Miss,’ he could have told her, ‘we will be fighting for forty years.{{' "}} He got that right, among many other things. | ||
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[[Category:Articles (MR)]] | [[Category:Articles (MR)]] | ||