The Mailer Review/Volume 9, 2015/Fly Boys and Angels: Mailer on the Moon: Difference between revisions

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“I would really like to go to the Moon.”{{sfn|Mills|1982|p=347}} In 1969, just before contracting with ''Life'' magazine for their three-part serialization of the book that would be published a year later as ''Of a Fire on the Moon'', Mailer’s astronautic ambitions were typically vaunting. Yet his remark was telling. Both his two previous books (''The Armies of the Night'' and ''Miami and the Siege of Chicago'') had been what he called “participatory journalism”{{sfn|Mills|1982|p=347}} and his coverage of the Apollo 11 moon shot would allow that only up to a certain obvious stage: “How can I participate in a landing on the moon?.”{{sfn|Mills|1982|p=347}} As noted by William Atwill, this was “a problem he had not had to face in any of his previous writing projects — the absolute separation of observer and event,”{{sfn|Atwill|1994|p=82}} while Matthew Tribbe makes a similar point: “How could he find anything meaningful to say about the cold, closed mechanized world of NASA, about a journey he could no more participate in directly than any other hack journalist, and about subjects, astronauts, who seemed to have no distinct personalities for him to investigate?”{{sfn|Tribbe|2014|p=51}} Since the astronauts’ lawyers refused him close access to them — as ''Life'' editor Thomas Griffith remembered, there was a fear that Mailer would portray them “as silly fly boys and ridicule their language”{{sfn|Mills|1982|p=349}} — that problematic would condition many aspects of ''Fire'', for better or worse.