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The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Mailer and Thompson on the Campaign Trail, 1972: Difference between revisions
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As leftists and as literary journalists, both writers openly displayed their subjectivities, but neither fully identified with the Democratic Party, choosing instead to think and write independently. Mailer, in fact, consistently labeled himself as a Left Conservative, and Thompson heaped a roughly equal amount of abuse on members of both major parties. The experience of George Orwell, a committed leftist but never a declared Socialist, offers a paradigm here. When Orwell was commissioned by The Left Book Club to write ''The Road to Wigan Pier'' (1937), a work of literary journalism dealing with the lives of England’s working poor, his account was criticized by some readers who expected a doctrinaire Marxist analysis. Richard Filloy argues that Orwell’s reliance on personal experience and development of his rhetorical ethos is his “chief means of persuasion,” claiming that for Orwell, “immediacy of experience is a kind of shorthand induction,” that is, it functions as anecdotal evidence which may be more persuasive than second-hand accounts or facts gathered through research.{{sfn|Filloy|1989|pp=54–55}} Filloy explains, in Burkean terms, that the “writer’s character, insofar as it is the means by which the reader and writer are shown to be ‘consubstantial,’ is basic to persuasion.”{{sfn|Filloy|1989|p=59}} Both Mailer and Thompson constructed compelling literary personae over their careers which lent their writing considerable rhetorical power. Mailer had achieved celebrity status early in his career with the publication of ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948) and had generated heated controversy based on his notoriously bellicose behavior and outspoken opposition to feminism. Mailer adopted a unique third-person approach to most of his literary journalism, appearing as “the reporter” in “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” as “Mailer” in ''The Armies of the Night'' (1968), and as “Aquarius” in St. George, and yet all these personae are Norman Mailer who, as a novelist, preferred to situate himself as a character detached from himself as author, but all the third person protagonists in Mailer’s campaign narratives are really first-person narrators in disguise. By 1972, following the publication of ''Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas'' (1971), Thompson had become an iconic personality, a rock star, a countercultural sensation, associated in readers’ minds with the grotesque caricatures provided by illustrator Ralph Steadman. | As leftists and as literary journalists, both writers openly displayed their subjectivities, but neither fully identified with the Democratic Party, choosing instead to think and write independently. Mailer, in fact, consistently labeled himself as a Left Conservative, and Thompson heaped a roughly equal amount of abuse on members of both major parties. The experience of George Orwell, a committed leftist but never a declared Socialist, offers a paradigm here. When Orwell was commissioned by The Left Book Club to write ''The Road to Wigan Pier'' (1937), a work of literary journalism dealing with the lives of England’s working poor, his account was criticized by some readers who expected a doctrinaire Marxist analysis. Richard Filloy argues that Orwell’s reliance on personal experience and development of his rhetorical ethos is his “chief means of persuasion,” claiming that for Orwell, “immediacy of experience is a kind of shorthand induction,” that is, it functions as anecdotal evidence which may be more persuasive than second-hand accounts or facts gathered through research.{{sfn|Filloy|1989|pp=54–55}} Filloy explains, in Burkean terms, that the “writer’s character, insofar as it is the means by which the reader and writer are shown to be ‘consubstantial,’ is basic to persuasion.”{{sfn|Filloy|1989|p=59}} Both Mailer and Thompson constructed compelling literary personae over their careers which lent their writing considerable rhetorical power. Mailer had achieved celebrity status early in his career with the publication of ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948) and had generated heated controversy based on his notoriously bellicose behavior and outspoken opposition to feminism. Mailer adopted a unique third-person approach to most of his literary journalism, appearing as “the reporter” in “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” as “Mailer” in ''The Armies of the Night'' (1968), and as “Aquarius” in St. George, and yet all these personae are Norman Mailer who, as a novelist, preferred to situate himself as a character detached from himself as author, but all the third person protagonists in Mailer’s campaign narratives are really first-person narrators in disguise. By 1972, following the publication of ''Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas'' (1971), Thompson had become an iconic personality, a rock star, a countercultural sensation, associated in readers’ minds with the grotesque caricatures provided by illustrator Ralph Steadman. | ||
As literary journalists, both writers practiced what Tom Wolfe called “saturation reporting,”{{sfn|Wolfe|Johnson|1973|p=21}} which requires the writer to become deeply immersed in his subject for an extended period of time and to provide in-depth reporting though close personal observation. Again we can look to the example of George Orwell, whose book-length journalism, particularly his time spent as a member of the anti-fascist POUM during the Spanish Civil War in Homage to Catalonia (1938), set a new standard for participatory journalism. Mailer participated in the events he covered as a journalist to varying degrees, from his direct participation in the 1972 march to the Pentagon in Armies to the relatively detached observer he became at the 1972 Miami conventions, but in his campaign journalism generally, Mailer never chose to make the extensive commitment of time and direct participation Thompson made in his literary journalism. Most famously, Thompson spent over a year drinking, drugging, and riding with the Hell’s Angels, and ultimately getting stomped by them. At one point, he even maintained that “I had become so involved in the outlaw scene that I was no longer sure whether I was doing research on the Hell’s Angels or being slowly absorbed by them.”{{sfn|Thompson|1966|p=66}} He later covered the ’72 campaign from the very beginning to the bitter end while filing lengthy monthly installments in ''Rolling Stone''. It should be noted, however, that both writers, at different points in their lives but prior to the 1972 campaign, undertook the ordeal of running for political office, Mailer for mayor of New York City and Thompson for sheriff of Pitkin County (Aspen), Colorado, so their personal political commitment extended beyond journalism. | |||
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* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=1976 |orig-year=1960 |chapter=Superman Comes to the Supermarket |title=Some Honorable Men: Political Conventions 1960–1972 |url= |location= |publisher=Little Brown and Company |pages=1–46 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} | * {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=1976 |orig-year=1960 |chapter=Superman Comes to the Supermarket |title=Some Honorable Men: Political Conventions 1960–1972 |url= |location= |publisher=Little Brown and Company |pages=1–46 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite book |last=Thompson |first=Hunter S. |date=1990 |chapter=Chicago 1968: Death to the Weird |title=Songs of the Doomed |url= |location= |publisher=Touchstone |pages=122–126 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} | * {{cite book |last=Thompson |first=Hunter S. |date=1990 |chapter=Chicago 1968: Death to the Weird |title=Songs of the Doomed |url= |location= |publisher=Touchstone |pages=122–126 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite book |last=Thompson |first=Hunter S. |author-mask=1 |date=1966 |title=Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga |url= |location= |publisher=Ballantine |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite book |last=Thompson |first=Hunter S. |author-mask=1 |date=1979 |chapter=Presenting: The Richard Nixon Doll (Overhauled 1968 Model) |title=The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time |url= |location= |publisher=Summit Books |pages=189-192 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} | * {{cite book |last=Thompson |first=Hunter S. |author-mask=1 |date=1979 |chapter=Presenting: The Richard Nixon Doll (Overhauled 1968 Model) |title=The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time |url= |location= |publisher=Summit Books |pages=189-192 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite book |editor1-last=Wolfe |editor1-first=Tom |editor2-last=Johnson |editor2-first=E. W. |date=1973 |title=The New Journalism |url= |location= |publisher=Harper & Row |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} | * {{cite book |editor1-last=Wolfe |editor1-first=Tom |editor2-last=Johnson |editor2-first=E. W. |date=1973 |title=The New Journalism |url= |location= |publisher=Harper & Row |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} | ||