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THE HEROES OF MY YOUTH DIED IN THE 1960S: my father and President John F. Kennedy in 1963,Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. Assassins took them all: cancer the first, bullets the rest. Losses of that magnitude, at least for a time, stripped life of its joy, reduced living to a mere alternative. It wasn't just me. The loss of my father was only a private preview of the pain, confusion and anger that was to scar and undermine my generation. Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray and Sirhan B. Sirhan, by themselves or in concert with powers unknown, helped to twist and turn us unproductively inward while in the background arose a damnable Asian war that left us mocking the principles, self-reliance and patriotism of our parents and their parents, and their parents before them. | THE HEROES OF MY YOUTH DIED IN THE 1960S: my father and President John F. Kennedy in 1963,Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. Assassins took them all: cancer the first, bullets the rest. Losses of that magnitude, at least for a time, stripped life of its joy, reduced living to a mere alternative. It wasn't just me. The loss of my father was only a private preview of the pain, confusion and anger that was to scar and undermine my generation. Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray and Sirhan B. Sirhan, by themselves or in concert with powers unknown, helped to twist and turn us unproductively inward while in the background arose a damnable Asian war that left us mocking the principles, self-reliance and patriotism of our parents and their parents, and their parents before them. | ||
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I knew nothing of Mailer until the late 1960s, when, as an undergraduate English major at the University of New Hampshire, I took a preponderance of courses in journalism. Our professor, the late Donald M. Murray, told us that we could never hope to be good if we did not first know what good really was, and so he insisted that as we learned to report, write and edit, we frequent the library's periodicals room, as well as newsstands and magazine racks in order to stay abreast of what our infinite betters were doing. | I knew nothing of Mailer until the late 1960s, when, as an undergraduate English major at the University of New Hampshire, I took a preponderance of courses in journalism. Our professor, the late Donald M. Murray, told us that we could never hope to be good if we did not first know what good really was, and so he insisted that as we learned to report, write and edit, we frequent the library's periodicals room, as well as newsstands and magazine racks in order to stay abreast of what our infinite betters were doing. | ||
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 (Hillstrom 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 (Jones 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. | |||
Little wonder that over the course of his long career he left his admirers awe-stricken and his detractors unhinged. No sooner had the latter defined him, properly pinned safely under glass as though he were some exotic, light-bearing creature with gossamer wings and razor-sharp fangs, than he would punch the pane into shards and fly off again to the edge of the cold dark unknown, next to be heard asking his eternal question, "Why?" of war mongers, of ancient pharaohs, of modern kings, of killers and cunning misfits, of social outcasts, even of Adolf Hitler. Should anyone have been surprised that as he neared the end of his odyssey, he also chose to confront the mightiest deity in Western Civilization? | |||
In some ways, it was more surprising that in 1995, with publication of ''Oswald's Tale,'' he would try to reconstruct Lee Harvey Oswald and dare to tug at the Gordian know of conspiracies that twine around him. Even now the skinny ex-Marine with the smirk on his lips stands at the center of the Baby Boomers' whirlwind, Mannlicher-Carcano 6.5 mm carbine in hand. | |||
There were reasons aplenty for Mailer to not touch him. | |||
In addition to the twenty-six volume report of the Warren Commission, which concluded that Oswald acted alone, score upon score of books already had been written about the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, some merely shoring up the findings of the commission, many others arguing that the assassination was the work of conspirators. My generation always has sensed that some malevolent force lurks beneath the national bed. Three assassinations in five years will do that, and when you add in the murders of Medgar Evers and Malcolm X, the number of assassinations in that span actually was five. Little wonder that decades later most Americans are still inclined to believe that Kennedy's murder involved, depending on the particular plot at hand, the Mafia, CIA, FBI, Cuba's Fidel Castro, the far right, the far left, the KGB, LBJ, or virtually any combination of the aforementioned. | |||
As a writer, Mailer also had to be acutely aware that the best any reconstruction can hope to be is a tilted and cracked mirror of a reality that was. While a good reconstruction can be a glory, one that is questionably handled breeds distrust of the very form. It is supremely risky business to rely on the aging memories of the players, to interpret or assign motive, or treat as fact that which can no longer be verified or proved. The author always is in the position of building a tower on one potentially brittle block after another. And the passage of thirty years could very well make the extraordinarily difficult nearly impossible. | |||
And then, in no small measure, Norman Mailer also would have to contend with the fact that he was ... well, Norman Mailer. By the early 1990s, though obviously and permanently ensconced in the pantheon of literati, his reputation was such that had he, instead, discovered the True Cross and carried it through the streets of Brooklyn, there would have been no shortage of people to decry both him and his achievement. | |||
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'' ...."(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 (qtd. in Hersey 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 ...."(160). | |||
Then Hersey asked, "Can we trust a reporter with such a bizarre history of brutality, insecurity, mischief, and voguishness ... ?"(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" (161). | |||
Since when did we judge a writer's work by whether his personal behavior offends our moral sensibilities? If we held actors and actresses to such a standard, Hollywood long ago would have gone the way of the dodo. Such scrutiny, it is lamentably clear today, might even snuff out the eternal flame on JFK's grave. More to the point, I suspect that no writer worth reading ever tried to argue that deception or obfuscation is anything less than deception or obfuscation. And that was never what Norman Mailer was about. Rather, for most of his literary life he presented himself, flaws, pugnacity, flamboyance and all, as crucible, filter and conduit, a unique and mighty churning vessel in which the facts and essences of one subject after another could be cooked, seasoned, churned, strained, and served up, to be accepted and enjoyed as a wholly new dish; call it what you will, but never intentionally a lie. | |||
''Oswald's Tale'' only bears that out, and it does so with such care, conscientiousness, candor and compassion that Mailer's effort should be applauded for those traits alone. The project was fraught with obvious and unique difficulties, some of them Herculean, owing to the extraordinary volume of information, the varying and contradictory nature of it, and the involvement of no fewer than one hundred and seventy different characters, so many that the book justifiably includes a five-page glossary of names. From start to finish, Mailer seemed more acutely aware than ever that his workmanship had to be noticeably clean, his methods transparent and his motives for taking one tack or another unassailable, or if not unassailable, then at the very least, readily understandable. | |||