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The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Norman Mailer: Miami and the Siege of Chicago: Difference between revisions
The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Norman Mailer: Miami and the Siege of Chicago (view source)
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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)]] | ||