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The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/A Favor for the Ages: Difference between revisions
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One day in March of 1968, Murray walked into class with the latest copy of ''Harper’s Magazine,'' showed us the cover story, “The Steps of the Pentagon,” and talked about its author, Mailer. Murray was, like the author, an Army combat veteran of World War II, and he said Mailer’s first critically acclaimed work, ''The Naked and the Dead'', was one of the finest novels—if not ''the'' finest—he had ever read, and that while war was its ostensible backdrop, the work was about so much more. And here, suddenly it seemed, in one of the oldest, most highly regarded general circulation magazines in the country, Mailer the allegorist, the moralist, the fine novelist, was reporting on the 1967 Vietnam protest march in Washington, D.C. | One day in March of 1968, Murray walked into class with the latest copy of ''Harper’s Magazine,'' showed us the cover story, “The Steps of the Pentagon,” and talked about its author, Mailer. Murray was, like the author, an Army combat veteran of World War II, and he said Mailer’s first critically acclaimed work, ''The Naked and the Dead'', was one of the finest novels—if not ''the'' finest—he had ever read, and that while war was its ostensible backdrop, the work was about so much more. And here, suddenly it seemed, in one of the oldest, most highly regarded general circulation magazines in the country, Mailer the allegorist, the moralist, the fine novelist, was reporting on the 1967 Vietnam protest march in Washington, D.C. | ||
And then Murray read long passages from the story. The piece was mesmerizing, a gift, the kind of work that made sense of chaos, that explained a historic moment with brilliant, gritty, nearly luminous clarity. The story roared for more than 90,000 words, the longest single piece ever published by an American magazine.{{sfn|Hillstrom|Collier|1998|p=22}} It chewed up the entire issue, a fact which helped to consign Willie Morris’ editorship of ''Harper’s'' to an early and untimely grave{{sfn|Jones|2007|p=64}} | And then Murray read long passages from the story. The piece was mesmerizing, a gift, the kind of work that made sense of chaos, that explained a historic moment with brilliant, gritty, nearly luminous clarity. The story roared for more than 90,000 words, the longest single piece ever published by an American magazine.{{sfn|Hillstrom|Collier|1998|p=22}} It chewed up the entire issue, a fact which helped to consign Willie Morris’ editorship of ''Harper’s'' to an early and untimely grave.{{sfn|Jones|2007|p=64}} The story became part of The ''Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History'', which in 1969 won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and a National Book Award in Arts and Letters, too. Eleven years later, in 1980, Mailer would win the Pulitzer again, this time for fiction, with ''The Executioner’s Song''. | ||
Remarkable. At one turn, Mailer could be the once-and-future journalist, erudite, hard-working to a fault, dazzling with invention, but restrained by the metes and bounds of reality. The next, he could be the celebrated novelist, startlingly fresh, daring and powerful. He could reach for truth with either hand. Genre mattered little; convention not at all. His bravado and originality made his work magnetic and, inevitably, controversial. | Remarkable. At one turn, Mailer could be the once-and-future journalist, erudite, hard-working to a fault, dazzling with invention, but restrained by the metes and bounds of reality. The next, he could be the celebrated novelist, startlingly fresh, daring and powerful. He could reach for truth with either hand. Genre mattered little; convention not at all. His bravado and originality made his work magnetic and, inevitably, controversial. | ||
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More likely than not, had John Hersey still been alive when ''Oswald’s Tale'' was published, he would have been among the critics. Hersey’s iconic 1946 reconstruction of the dropping of the atomic bomb in World War II, ''Hiroshima,'' was a milestone in modern reporting and an oft-cited influence on countless journalists for decades thereafter. The 31,000-word story was given the entire Aug. 31 issue of ''The New Yorker.'' No literary effort did more to awaken the world to the horrors of nuclear war. | More likely than not, had John Hersey still been alive when ''Oswald’s Tale'' was published, he would have been among the critics. Hersey’s iconic 1946 reconstruction of the dropping of the atomic bomb in World War II, ''Hiroshima,'' was a milestone in modern reporting and an oft-cited influence on countless journalists for decades thereafter. The 31,000-word story was given the entire Aug. 31 issue of ''The New Yorker.'' No literary effort did more to awaken the world to the horrors of nuclear war. | ||
In his well-known 1986 essay, “The Legend on the License,” Hersey decried a trend in reportage that he saw as blurring the line between fiction and nonfiction. For journalism, he laid down “one sacred rule . . . The writer must not invent. The legend on the license must read: ''NONE'' OF THIS WAS MADE UP.”{{sfn|Hersey|2006|p=153}} | In his well-known 1986 essay, “The Legend on the License,” Hersey decried a trend in reportage that he saw as blurring the line between fiction and nonfiction. For journalism, he laid down “one sacred rule . . . The writer must not invent. The legend on the license must read: ''NONE'' OF THIS WAS MADE UP.”{{sfn|Hersey|2006|p=153}} Then he excoriated three of the day’s most celebrated writers—Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote and Norman Mailer. | ||
Hersey praised Mailer’s work, ''The Executioner’s Song,'' as eloquent fiction, but insisted that despite Mailer’s defense of the work as “a model of complete, precise and accurate reporting,” he was not to be trusted as a journalist.{{sfn|Hersey|2006|p=160}} | Hersey praised Mailer’s work, ''The Executioner’s Song,'' as eloquent fiction, but insisted that despite Mailer’s defense of the work as “a model of complete, precise and accurate reporting,” he was not to be trusted as a journalist.{{sfn|Hersey|2006|p=160}} Hersey’s rationale was not based solely on Mailer’s inclination to meld interpretation and judgement with verifiable fact, or even on his earlier propensity to assume a player’s role in the drama on which he was reporting. | ||
Instead, Hersey rather inexplicably attacked Mailer for personal conduct that even Charity might have condemned as unruly. “[H]e has scattered his macho boasts and seed among a flock of wives, mistresses, and bare acquaintances; near dawn after a night of carousal and quarrels he made a pretty fair attempt on the life of one of these ladies with a cheap knife; he has romanticized marijuana . . . tried to bite an earlobe off an actor.”{{sfn|Hersey|2006|p=160}} | Instead, Hersey rather inexplicably attacked Mailer for personal conduct that even Charity might have condemned as unruly. “[H]e has scattered his macho boasts and seed among a flock of wives, mistresses, and bare acquaintances; near dawn after a night of carousal and quarrels he made a pretty fair attempt on the life of one of these ladies with a cheap knife; he has romanticized marijuana . . . tried to bite an earlobe off an actor.”{{sfn|Hersey|2006|p=160}} | ||
Then Hersey asked, “Can we trust a reporter with such a bizarre history of brutality, insecurity, mischief, and voguishness . . . ?”{{sfn|Hersey|2006|p=160}} And he answered: “Am I saying that we can accept what Mailer says as a novelist and cannot accept what he says as a journalist? Baffled by the impossibility of knowing when he is which, I am.”{{sfn|Hersey|2006|p=161}} | Then Hersey asked, “Can we trust a reporter with such a bizarre history of brutality, insecurity, mischief, and voguishness . . . ?”{{sfn|Hersey|2006|p=160}} And he answered: “Am I saying that we can accept what Mailer says as a novelist and cannot accept what he says as a journalist? Baffled by the impossibility of knowing when he is which, I am.”{{sfn|Hersey|2006|p=161}} | ||