Crossing Swords: Norman Mailer and the Culture Wars
by George Shadroui | View comments |
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The cultural impact of the 1960s was sobering: divorce, pornography, drug use, single-parent families, infidelities, unwed mothers and teen-aged pregnancies all exploded, contributing to enclaves of dysfunctional and destructive behavior that constituted a national disaster. Norman Mailer, for all his (occasional) claims of being a social conservative, played a prominent role in ushering in this age of irresponsibility.
If there is such a thing as a parallel universe, perhaps Norman Mailer played William F. Buckley Jr.’s evil twin?
Well, perhaps not evil, but certainly opposite. Consider: Bill Buckley loved his wife, Mailer no doubt loved his wives, all six of them; Buckley loved Bach, Mailer loved boxing; Mailer wrote long, difficult books, Buckley feared boring his readers and wrote short, digestible books; Buckley threatened to punch a couple of folks; Mailer attacked one of his wives and challenged many a public personality to a bout in the ring; Mailer became an icon on the Left, Buckley on the Right. Buckley was celebrated for being kind, Mailer for being boorish. Mailer celebrated violence, Buckley faith.
Then again, they had things in common, too. Both loved a good drink. Both ran for mayor of New York City. Neither could stomach Gore Vidal. Both emerged as a major force in American letters. And both wrote beautifully. They were friends of a sort, though Buckley would privately lament Mailer’s untidy personal life.
When the 1950s and 1960s began to tear at the fabric of American culture, Norman Mailer appointed himself as leading debunker of American morals and norms. Buckley worked overtime to counteract the impact of people like Mailer and the band of leftists and counter culture gurus who followed him into the abyss that would consume, among others, Hunter S. Thompson, Truman Capote, Timothy Leary and an entire generation of young people. When Buckley beheld what the 1960s wrought, he was dismayed — Mailer fascinated.
Vietnam , too, became a critical debate. While Mailer lined up with the Hollywood Left to march and protest, writing Armies of the Night (starring Norman Mailer), Buckley posed the fundamental question that haunts every generation in a free society: are we willing to fight for freedom even when it is difficult and costly? Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Mailer covered the conventions, dashed off political essays and debated with Buckley. Yet his impact was felt not so much in the political realm as in wider American culture. He shaped the literary style of his generation, made personality more important than content, and transformed public personalities into cultural icons, writing with a skill and grace that Buckley admired; Norman Mailer is a genius, he once wrote, and I’m not.
Yet Mailer's career underscored an often forgotten truism: genius in one arena does not necessarily translate into wisdom in others. The Naked and the Dead, published in 1948, had launched Mailer instantly into literary stardom and is still rated as one of the most significant American novels of the 20th century. Several books followed, none of them greeted with quite the fanfare of the first. Then in the late 1950s, Mailer began to insert into his writing the topic he most loved: himself. Suddenly, he was cranking out work almost as fast as marriages. During a 15-year stretch, in addition to several novels, he published Advertisements for Myself, The Presidential Papers, Armies of the Night, Cannibals and Christians, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, and St. George and the Godfather. Most of these books focused on the contemporary political and cultural scene, with special emphasis on the counterculture: the sexual revolution, the anti-war movement, anti-establishment violence (lampooned so brilliantly by Tom Wolfe), and anti-Americanism of the sort Hollywood and New York elites elevated to an art form. He co-founded The Village Voice and debated on college campuses across the nation.
One thing became apparent during the 1960s: Mailer, pugnacious provocateur, party man, icon of the radically chic, genius and relentless critic of his own country, had emerged as one of the handful of leading literary personalities in American political culture. He also helped lead a generation of discontented radicals and cultural revolutionaries into the 1960s, otherwise known as a decade of excess. Mailer’s cultural impact was reported by his biographer, Hilary Mills, who wrote that during the late 1950s and 1960s: “Norman Mailer would not write another novel for ten years. But during that time he would create a public personality so vivid and outrageous, so seething with frustration at what he viewed as establishment repression, that not only would he remain visible in the literary world but he would help to lay the psychic groundwork for a new generation of alienated youth.” (Mailer, p. 161)
His greatest impact during those heady days was on journalism – or rather in transforming journalism into pseudo-literature. Among those on whom Mailer trained his literary talents were Muhammad Ali, Floyd Patterson, John Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe and Ernest Hemingway. Some would credit him (others Tom Wolfe) with creating “new journalism,” which sought to go behind the scenes of major events and personalities to uncover the truth of things. In many instances, the author became the focus rather than the subject. Mailer brought a literary eye to the work-a-day world of journalism. Consider this paragraph from his famous Esquire essay on JFK, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket.”
His personal quality had a subtle, not quite describable intensity, a suggestion of dry pent heat perhaps, his eyes large, the pupils grey, the whites prominent, almost shocking, his most forceful feature: he had the eyes of a mountaineer. His appearance changed with his mood, strikingly so, and this made him always more interesting that what he was saying. He would seem at one moment older than his age, forty-eight or fifty, a tall, slim, sunburned professor with a pleasant weathered face, not even particularly handsome; five minutes later, talking to a press conference on his lawn, three microphones before him, a television camera turning, his appearance would have gone through a metamorphosis, he would look again like a movie star, his coloring vivid, his manner rich, his gestures strong and quick, alive with that concentration of vitality a successful actor always seems to radiate.
This gift for cultural and political insight did not lead to sane political judgment. During his political heyday, he suggested that America was headed toward totalitarianism. He testified glowingly at the Chicago Seven trial on behalf of Jerry Rubin and the anti-war protesters. In 1975, he participated in a group forum on Vietnam featured in the New York Review of Books. Perhaps his most telling comment was this: "The effect of the war on American life and on the US position in the world has obviously been next to wholly negative. With one remarkable exception. The resistance of the Left in America broke the will of the establishment to wage a serious war."
George Plimpton wrote that Mailer was arguably the most competitive person he had ever met. A great writer, a fascinating personality, but ultimately tiresome because – like Gore Vidal – he could never put his ego or his talent aside long enough to cultivate normalcy or the small kindnesses that make life worthwhile. He would engage in staring contests with women, a comical effort to assert his dominance. He challenged endless people to fights, as if mimicking a character out of The Sun Also Rises. When he tried to arrange a meeting with Hemingway through Plimpton, and the meeting did not come off, Plimpton asked Mailer what he would have said. Mailer immediately acknowledged that he would have criticized his hero. He went after Gore Vidal, who probably deserved it, but then he went after virtually everyone. Buckley seemed to be one person who brought out Mailer’s better side, but then Mailer had never met anyone quite like Buckley. He famously wrote of his debating opponent: “No other actor can project simultaneous hints that he is in the act of playing Commodore of the Yacht Club, Joseph Goebbels, Robert Mitchum, Maverick, Savonarola, the nice prep-school kid next door, and the snows of yesteryear.”
Mailer’s explosion onto the literary/political scene roughly coincided with Buckley’s, which is no doubt why they were paired to dance their political tango across the nation, Buckley the responsible, establishment conservative, Mailer the radical voice of discontent. Buckley recounted how they first met in a column written upon Mailer’s death:
Mailer's career intersected with my own when in September 1962 two entrepreneurs rented the Medinah Temple in Chicago, which held over 4,000 people, and engaged Mailer and me to debate on the nature of the right wing in American politics. It pleased Mailer, who was complaining widely about his poverty, that Playboy magazine immediately contracted to publish his and my opening statements in its next issue.
The debate underscored their conflicting worldviews and their differences on a host of personal and political issues. Buckley began by observing Mailer’s highly egocentric and sexually obsessed personality.
I welcome Mr. Mailer’s interest in the American right wing. On behalf of the right wing let me say that we, in turn, are interested in Mr. Mailer and look forward to co-existence and cultural exchanges in the years to come. I hope we can maintain his interest, though I confess to certain misgivings. I am not sure we have enough sexual neuroses for him. But if we have any at all, no doubt he will find them and celebrate them – if not here tonight, then perhaps in a sequel to the essay in which he gave, to a world tormented by an inexact knowledge of the causes of tension between the Negro and the white races in the South, the long-awaited answer, namely, that all Southern politics reflects the white man’s resentment of the superior sexual potency of the Negro male.
– Let Us Talk of Many Things, p. 48-49.
These bizarre efforts to interpret cultural dynamics both fascinated and appalled critics and readers, but it was Mailer's views on Castro that most disturbed Buckley. One Cuban carpenter, when faced with his son being sent unwillingly to the Soviet Union for six years of communist indoctrination and schooling, killed his family and himself rather than consent. Buckley tried to put the incident in perspective.
This is not merely a personal tragedy, any more than the story of Anne Frank was merely a personal tragedy. It is part of a systematic tragedy, just as the annihilation camps in Germany and Poland were part of a systematic tragedy: the tragedy that arises not out of the workday recognition of man’s capacity for brutality but out of the recognition that man’s capacity for good is equal to the task of containing systematic horror but that we are nevertheless frozen in inactivity. The horror spreads, leaping over continents and oceans and slithering up to our shoreline, while those whose job it is to contain it grind out their diplomatic nothingness, and the nation’s poets wallow in their own little sorrows. The American right wing – of which I am merely one member, clumsily trying to say what Norman Mailer with his superior skills would be saying so very much better if only he would raise his eyes from the world’s genital glands – is trying to understand why; is trying to understand what is that philosophy of despair and who voted to make it the law of nations, that we should yield to it; that philosophy which teaches us to be impotent while fury strikes at the carpenter’s home ninety miles from the greatest giant history ever bred, whose hands are held down by the Lilliputian solipsists of contemporary liberalism.
– Let Us Talk, p. 51-52.
Buckley’s strong anti-communism was evident here, and he lamented the delusional nature of the modern liberal that allowed Fidel Castro to receive a standing ovation on the campus of Harvard University. Buckley argued not that America could be everywhere, but that it surely could be in a few places that would have symbolically demonstrated America’s commitment to freedom. Mailer’s response was reprinted not only in Playboy, but in his own collection of writings, The Presidential Papers. Mailer first lodged the charge of war-mongering at Buckley, whose right wing was “ready to go to war with a ready-made world, which they feel is stifling them.” Mailer did not dwell on the Cold War initially, but began by focusing on his own sense that conservatives were less interested in conserving the past than they were in embracing modern culture, which was a form of the plague.
Now this plague appears to us as a sickening of our substance, an electrification of our nerves, a deterioration of desire, an apathy about the future, a detestation of the present, an amnesia of the past. Its forms are many, its flavor unforgettable: It is the disease which destroys flavor. Its symptoms appear everywhere: in architecture, medicine, in the deteriorated quality of labor, the insubstantiality of money, the ravishment of nature, the impoverishment of food, the manipulation of emotion, the emptiness of faith, the displacement of sex, the deterioration of language, the reduction of philosophy, and the alienation of man from the product of work and the results of his acts.
– The Presidential Papers, p. 165.
Mailer accused the Right of embracing a collectivized point of view, corporate and free enterprise America being committed to profit at any cost. He continued in this vein.
So long as there is a cold war, there cannot be a conservative administration in America. There cannot for the simplest reason. Conservatism depends upon a huge reduction in the power and the budget of the central Government. Indeed, so long as there is a cold war, there are no politics of consequence in America. It matters less each year which party holds the power. Before the enormity of defense expenditures, there is no alternative to an ever-increasing welfare state. It can be an interesting welfare state like the present one, or a dull welfare state like President Eisenhower’s. It can even be a totally repressive welfare state like President Goldwater’s well might be. But the conservatives might recognize that greater economic liberty is not possible so long as one is building a greater war machine. To pretend that both can be real is hypocritical beyond belief.
– TPP, p. 170-171.
Mailer, sounding very much like Pat Buchanan 30 year later, then trumpeted a theme that would reverberate among certain factions of the Left and Right for decades to come: “End the cold war. Pull back our boundaries to what we can defend and to what wishes to be defended . . . we do not have to hold every loose piece of real estate on earth to have security. Let communism come to those countries it will come to. Let us not use up our substance trying to hold onto nations which are poor, underdeveloped, and bound to us only by the depths of their hatred for us. We cannot equal the effort the Communists make in such places. We are not dedicated in that direction.” (TPP, p. 171)
A few points might be worth annunciating. First, at the time that Mailer wrote his comments, the percentage of GNP dedicated to defense was historically quite high – somewhere around 9 percent. Twenty years later, under Reagan, this number would be cut to a high of 6.1 percent and still the Left was appalled by the resources being dedicated to the cause of anti-communism and America’s defense. Indeed, today the Bush administration has a defense budget that is about 4 percent of GNP and it is still an issue for the Democrats and the Left. Second, Buckley never accepted the notion that a strong America served as a stimulant to an aggressive Soviet Union. On the contrary, his point was that a strong, defiant and freedom-loving America would deter Soviet adventurism. There was no reason to choose “better red than dead” because a self-confident foreign policy would make possible a different formulation altogether – neither dead nor red, but alive and free.
Mailer would claim that he won the debate with Buckley. His commentary, included with his remarks in The Presidential Papers, sounds childishly competitive, underscoring Plimpton’s observations. “Afterward, I claimed victory . . . One could claim the victory a fortiori, and say I was popular with the audience, but then Buckley might argue as much for himself . . . No, I’d argue I won the debate on formal grounds . . . when the debate ended, I had succeeded in pushing a salient into the intellectual territory of the Right, which was not counter-attacked by Buckley. So I claimed the victory. If we ever debate again, Buckley will be hunting for mountain lion. Knowing my opponent he will doubtless use an elephant gun.” (TPP, p. 174)
The New York Times saw it differently, though the reporter covering the debate hardly expected the response from Mailer about a headline calling the debate a draw. It happened that the young gun covering the debate for the Times was Gay Talese, who would himself emerge as one of the great new journalists of the 1960s and 1970s. After Mailer’s death last year, Talese appeared on the Newshour with Jim Lehrer and recalled his encounter with Mailer after the debate story appeared.
I remember, when I was a young man, I was a reporter at the New York Times. And one time in 1962, I was in Chicago, and there was a debate between Norman Mailer and William F. Buckley. I went to the place where the debate was. And I thought it was well — I thought it was interesting, but there's no way I could judge the debate, so I wrote a story for the Times in which I said the debate was a draw, Buckley-Mailer, draw.
The next day I was at an event, and Mailer, in a large crowd of people, and people were having drinks. And Mailer came across the room, and he was carrying this drink. And he walked up to me, and he looked at me, and he was so — it seemed to be so angry, and it seemed to me, moreover, he was going to throw that drink on me. And he said, "Draw? What do you mean draw? There was no draw. I annihilated him. I wiped out Buckley." I said, "Listen, Norman , I wasn't being that serious." "But it wasn't a draw."
And I felt that what he hated was having something that was neutral, a Mailer that was in a draw. I mean, he could have taken Mailer seriously or I should taken him as being knocked down, knocked out, but not one where it was a draw. He hated the word. I thought, "That's Mailer."
Each man, of course, had his supporters. Abbie Hoffman, another of the counterculture heroes of the 1960s, was in the audience. He would recount his own pro-Mailer sentiments: “There you felt on a gut level that William Buckley was representing everything you didn’t like in your college experience. All that rah-rah baloney, the genteel and gentile power structure, the martini set and the Madison Avenue gray flannel suits. Buckley represented the empire, and Mailer was challenging the empire as a hip, ethnic street fight. That was extremely appealing to me. There was no doubt emotionally about whose side I would be on.” (Mailer, p. 292)
By the time they debated on Firing Line in May of 1968, Mailer had fully emerged as a leading leftist icon. His book, Armies of the Night, would receive accolades of all kinds, including the National Book Award. He would soon write as well Miami and the Siege of Chicago, integrating himself and all the other left liberal celebrities into the tensions that rocked both cities in 1968. Mailer’s self-regard was apparent even as he joined Buckley to discuss Armies of the Night, but of course Buckley’s goal was to puncture not only Mailer’s self-regard, but the bubble of self-importance that attached to those known as 1960s celebrity radicals.
It is safe to say that men of better critical judgment than Mr. Mailer now regard him as the best writer in America. His technique is one of unalloyed narcissism, mitigated by a recognition of, not to say devotion to his own shortcomings. One unappreciative reviewer, a couple of books back, summarized, quote, we are assured that our hero fought one of his brawls after getting two hammer blows on the head, that he put Kennedy in office, and could put Floyd Patterson back on his throne, that he out-debated Buckley, that he out-writes everybody since Hemingway, and out-loves everybody since Casonova.
Thus began a strange Firing Line discussion, as Mr. Mailer’s narcissism and (perhaps) Mr. Buckley’s fascination with it became the topic of the first half of the show. They spent an inordinate amount of time debating drunkenness, which became relevant because Mailer would claim to have been under the influence of alcohol when he participated in the march on the Pentagon. Buckley tried to nail down his concern about the flagrant abuse of the law that had become commonplace in the 1960s, urged on, as it happens, by left-leaning celebrities who relished their status as resistors and protestors.
B: Well, do you, as a general proposition, believe that when you break the law, you should go to jail?
M: Well, that’s an enormously complex matter, and I want get into it with you later, but on this one, I’d say of course. You now, of course, in the sense, in the limited sense that I was breaking, I was constantly breaking the law, on this matter, and so I expected to be sent to jail. I also expected I must admit that the sentence would be very slight. But if I’d known it was greater, I think I still would have, you know, planned to get arrested, because I wished to protest the war in Vietnam.
It is worth quoting at length from his book, Miami and the Siege of Chicago. Caught in the snares of the police who had brought him in for his activities outside the Chicago convention, Mailer sang a different tune (and acknowledged it to readers, most of whom, of course, did not see the Firing Line episode.)
“Why,” asked the Commander, “do you always want to get arrested.”
The reporter thought of his children, and for an instant tears nearly came. Not real tears so much as – the Victorians used to say – his eyes were wet with dew.
“Commander I don’t want to get arrested,” he said.
“I’m glad to hear that, Mr. Mailer. But it’s your reputation that you like to get arrested.”
“Newspapers lie all the time. Look what they say about you fellows.”
Happiness came again into Lyon’s face. “I got,” he said, “to read one of your books.”
And so Mailer was released to join his celebrity protestors at the Playboy mansion, which has been, over the years, the headquarters for leftist celebrity intellectuals for many years.
While he had second thoughts about the glamour of being arrested, he had not changed his mind about Castro in the years between his debate with Buckley in 1962 and his appearance on Firing Line. “You know, I think he’s a remarkable man. I’m tremendously fond of him. I have great respect for him. I have a great respect for Castro . . . You know there’s such a thing as a great cop and such a thing as a great criminal. And the way I work, it’s very hard to explain this to people, but I don’t think in categories . . . there is a better world when cops get better and when criminals get better.”
Buckley asked Mailer to explain this rather convoluted thought – would Castro be a better criminal because he murdered and imprisoned more people than he already had?
B: Well . . . what makes a good criminal class?”
M: Imagination . . . vitality, brilliance.
B: Well, then for instance, we might say that Hitler showed extraordinary imagination, when you consider the scale in which he undertook genocide.
M: He was absolutely untrue to his own ideas. He betrayed his own ideas . . .
B: Presumably, the ideas of the criminal, or whether the criminal is a mass murderer or an arsonist or a thief is to protect his craft. So, if you’re asking for a better criminal, I think you’d better make it clear what it is that you mean.
This exchange indicates rather dramatically the extremes to which Mailer would go to gain attention by being outrageous and, like much of the debate with Buckley, it was difficult to follow his romanticized notions of communism, Castro or violence, which unfortunately define much of his thinking over the years. It got no better when Mailer and Buckley moved the issue to law-breaking as a societal problem and Mailer argued that the Left, more than the Right, sought political stability.
B: The point is that the political Left takes its politics so seriously that it understand the necessity of abiding by the law?
M: No sir.
B: No?
M: No. No. I was talking about emotional matters . . . You know, there’s something about a proper life that tends to make one a little more radical in his opinions, and I’ve always felt this has been a disease of the Left, you see? Just as the disease of the Right is greed, bigotry, insensitivity, and general stupidity, so the disease of the Left – yourself excluded, sir – I assure you of that. So, the disease of the Left has always been excessive propriety in family life, excessive obedience to all the small laws of daily life, such as not crossing at the corners. You’'' find that many more Communists and Trotskyites and people like that will not cross at the corners . . .
B: Well, that’s because they want to save themselves as lawbreakers for major occasions, isn’t it.
M: I think the real reason is that they think of overturning society because they do not know how to break a few small rules, and laws.
And so it went, with Buckley trying, hopelessly, to make sense of Mailer’s rambling, incoherent discussion. In his book, On the Firing Line, Buckley quoted the line from Mailer that explaining his need to break the law was complex. Buckley added: “Too complex, it turns out, to handle even in an hour’s exchange.”
Even Buckley’s probing and commentary with Mailer, as astute as it was, did not reveal how truly bizarre Mailer’s life and opinions were becoming. Throughout this period, whether exploring political conventions, political personalities or his own often bizarre ideas about mating, sex, violence, food and technology, Mailer wrote like a Jeremiah preaching in the wilderness. He came off as an Old Testament prophet obsessed with vengeance, women as a means for propagating his own tribe, and cult-like attitudes about sexuality (sowing the seed in a woman is a sacred obligation, but destroying the child through abortion was not the ultimate profanation – masturbation was). Mailer preached his gospel of discontent at every turn, convinced (quite literally) that he and his literary talents might save the Republic. He once claimed that his article on Kennedy might have gotten him elected. His self-importance, particularly in those heady days of the 1960s and 1970s, knew no bounds.
With no frontier to conquer, and no desire to roll back leftist totalitarian forces, he roamed the urban landscape of America in search of monsters to confront and destroy. He found domestic enemies lurking everywhere — in the police who played bad guy to his protester hero; in a popular culture that robbed America of its aesthetic beauty; in a corporate America that unleashed environmental disaster; in small town America that painted life in the dull shades that Mailer found more offensive than violence and political extremism.
Yet, for all this efforts, the establishment hardly cared. What is a prophet to do when the people fail to heed the word? Mailer faced this dilemma, even as he enjoyed celebrity and wealth. Many recognized his talent, but few took his ideas seriously, and is it any wonder? In his anxious quest to find eternal answers to temporal problems, Mailer would exemplify Chesterton's observation that he who believes in nothing can believe in anything. Mailer ranted and raved against the times, even as he helped create the times that he so detested.
The twentieth century may yet be seen as that era when civilized man and underprivileged man were melted together into mass man, the iron and steel of the nineteenth century giving way to the electronic circuits which communicated their messages into men, the unmistakable tendency of the new century seeming to be the creation of men as interchangeable as commodities, their extremes of personality singed out of existence by the psychic fields of force the communicators would impose.
– The Presidential Papers, p. 38-39.
The mythic America celebrated in literature and history was fading away. He could appreciate the passions, greed and lust for excess wrapped up in violence. This was an America of real men, but then the seeds of doubt were sown by Sputnik and the civil rights movement. America lost its self-confidence, no longer able to rely on traditional forces for answers, and when the Hippie arrived, questioning all manner of things, the need for an existential hero was born, a hero who could rescue the nation from Ike and his small town mentality, his capacity to suck the color out of the sharp hews of life. But as Mailer anticipated JFK, about whom much of this was written, it was really Castro on whom he focused his affection, writing in an open letter: "You belong not to the United States nor to the Russians but to We of the Third Force. So long as you exist and belong neither to America nor to Russia , you give a bit of life to the best and most passionate men and women of the earth . . .." (The Presidential Papers, p. 75)
Mailer publicly worried that JFK might lead America to tyranny and dictatorship, thus underscoring that Mailer, like the fellow travelers of the 1920s and 1930s, had lost his political sense long before he took to the streets with anti-Vietnam War protesters. His great contribution to human rights in Cuba was to suggest that Castro invite Hemingway back to the country so the great novelist could resurrect his fallen talents. His most notorious essay, “The White Negro,” was published by Dissent magazine and appeared in his collection, Advertisements for Myself. It was a strange mix of psycho-babble, new age spiritualism and unadulterated Freudianism. It speaks for itself.
The psychopath murders — if he has the courage — out of necessity to purge his violence, for if he cannot empty his hatred then he cannot love . . . At bottom, the dram of the psychopath is that he seeks love. Not love as the search for a mate, but love as the search for an orgasm more apocalyptic than the one which preceded it.
– Advertisements for Myself, p. 347.What is consequent therefore is the divorce of man from his values, the liberation of self from the Super-ego of society . . . the only Hip morality is to do what one feels whenever and wherever it is possible . . . It is this adoration of the present which contains the affirmation of Hip, because its ultimate logic suppresses even the unforgettable solution of the Marquis De Sade . . . the nihilism of Hip proposes as its final tendency that every social restraint and category be removed, and the affirmation implicit in the proposal is that man would then prove to be more creative than murderous and so would not destroy himself . . . Which is exactly what separates Hip from the authoritarian philosophies which now appeal to the conservative and liberal temper — what haunts the middle of the twentieth century is that faith in man has been lost, and the appeal of authority has been that it would restrain us from ourselves. Hip, which would return us to ourselves, at no matter what price in individual violence, is the affirmation of the barbarian . . .
– AFM, pages 352-355.
The Hipster, of course, drew his inspiration from the Negro male, who had learned to live in a world of fear, violence and denigration, locked as he was in the present, unable to contemplate a future, and so tied and bound to the instant gratification that comes with the release of sexual or violent energy. Is it any wonder, Buckley must have asked himself, that Mailer drank so much? “The White Negro” made quite a splash, with some of the literati calling it a prophetic piece. Dissent magazine published it, though Irving Howe, the magazine’s editor, would later admit he should have edited some of the gratuitous references to violence.
Mailer himself would begin to question his commitments to New Left radicalism. He would call himself at times a cultural conservative, would distance himself from the drug culture, and would actually show some sympathy for Nixon as he covered the two conventions. What Mailer probably most feared came to pass as he observed the 1972 political conventions, which he wrote about in St. George and the Godfather. The last of the protesters were still hanging around Flamingo Park by then, but it was a far cry from the glorious days of the march on the Pentagon in 1968. Mailer almost craved a return to the clashes of armies in the night: "Were the armies of the final Armageddon forming in the seed of men not yet born, or would even this calm summer end in blood." (St. George, p. 31)
No, there would be no blood in the streets that year because Nixon was ascendant, McGovern ineffectual and Vietnam, while still a hot war, was losing its capacity to shock and shape the nation. Things had settled into a dull and uninspiring routine for the protesters. "Their common enemy, the pigs, are no longer common, for the pigs are not acting like pigs . . . since the police are not vicious, the threat of brutal arrests no longer draws them together nor gives the dignity of combating large fear.” (St. George, p. 218)
Combating large fear was Mailer’s goal, for only large fears created great men, and Mailer was desperate to be a great man, the man with all the answers, the great prophet on the edge of the end time, proclaiming a new savior, a new vision, a new gospel — a gospel according to Mailer. Hilary Mills would write of this active period that Mailer “would devise a public personality so provocative that it would demand attention for his ideas. If Mailer the failed novelist could not move the culture with his fictional imagination, he would make his own life a story that others would have to follow. It would inspire the underground army of similar souls which Mailer suddenly envisioned around him to nothing less than a revolution against the oppressors.” (Mailer, p. 163)
And yet, he could not sustain his energy or his high-flying cultural warrior act. From the late 1970s through the 1990s, Mailer, apparently exhausted by his frenetic activities over two decades, largely withdrew from political life and retreated into his literary pursuits. During this period he wrote arguably his most successful fiction since The Naked and the Dead – The Executioner’s Song, Ancient Evenings, and Harlot’s Ghost. (Armies of the Night, while billed as a fictional work, was largely reportorial and autobiographical.)
It was not until George W. Bush took office that Mailer the radical political activist reemerged compliments of the war in Iraq. The New York Review of Books gave Mailer a lead article on its pages, mostly adapted from an interview that Mailer gave to the American Conservative, Pat Buchanan’s magazine which was on record against the war. Mailer appeared on C-SPAN to discuss a new book and could not resist throwing a jab or two at Bush. Watching it all, an observation on Mailer made by Buckley almost 40 years ago warrants revisiting: "If there is an intellectual in the United States who talks more predictable nonsense on the subject of foreign policy, I will pay a week's wages not to have to hear him."
Of course, Mailer was hardly alone in being resurrected by the Iraq war. The energized fringe Left rolled out all the old icons who were anxious to take another celebrated ride on the anti-American bandwagon. There was Vidal in USA Today and on C-SPAN, spouting his conspiracy theories about US hegemony; there was Chomsky, cranking out more turgid tomes of half-truths and outright lies; there was Susan Sontag, blaming America again; and there was Mailer, the most entertaining of them all because he always had a flair for drama in which he played a central role.
In his essay in NYRB, the man who once claimed the United States was on the verge of totalitarianism wrote that instead the United States was becoming a Banana Republic. President Bush was not legitimate, Mailer informed readers, because he won Florida in 2000 through legal duplicity, not democratic process. The fact that Bush won the election and the recounts – four times – was apparently immaterial to Mailer. Mailer conceded that Saddam was evil and might have found a way to share weapons of mass destruction with some of our enemies, but it was unlikely given that he and Bin Laden were natural enemies but for their shared hatred of the United States. Mailer laid the blame for the complex dilemmas on the United States. "How did we allow [emphasis added] such choices in the first place – these hellish Hobson choices?" We allowed it, in case Mailer had forgotten, by respecting the wishes of the very international community Mailer loved to cite, which prohibited U.S.-led troops from toppling the dictator in Baghdad back in 1991.
Then Mailer presented a fantasy trip that incorporated virtually every leftist cliché he had ever directed at the United States. I paraphrase: America has allowed big corporations to rob its soul, and destroy the environment. Bush is obsessed with building an American empire, thus the rush to war. Bush's embrace of empire as a way of life is rooted in his near messianic obsessions about good versus evil, a dangerous road that could literally embroil us endlessly in conflicts around the world. Not to mention his desire to control Iraqi oil and make the world safe for corporations everywhere. This is all somehow connected to the scandals about Catholic priests, the fall in the stock market, bad architecture and technological excess.
Mailer then offered this insight: "So one perk for the White House, should America become an international military machine huge enough to conquer all adversaries, is that American sexual freedom, all that gay, feminist, lesbian, transvestite hullabaloo, will be seen as too much of a luxury and will be put back into the closet again." Confused? Me, too.
What was increasingly apparent was that Norman Mailer had not had a new political idea in almost 40 years. He remained deeply pessimistic about the country in which he won fame and fortune. Unable to escape the Mailer persona that made him a celebrity in the 1960s, Mailer continued to see all issues in shades of the 1960s. The communists of yesteryear were the Saddams of today, and not a threat worthy of action. Nixon then was Bush now. The Chicago Seven then must be the folks out on the streets in Europe and America (alas, on that score, he might have been right).
Mailer was a grand old man of American letters and some of his concerns about American culture have been worthy of serious consideration. What cannot pass without critique was his one-sided and highly tendentious representation of the situation in Iraq and the Middle East. We did not need to encourage people to hate our country on the basis of hallucinations of empire conjured up by the likes of Mailer, Vidal and Chomsky. The dead of 9/11 were not hallucinations; the destruction near our capitol was no fantasy. That Bush and the neoconservatives invented this war to control oil is a notion that has been thoroughly debunked even by tough critics of the war, who have reported that Bush and his team were convinced that weapons of mass destruction existed and posted a threat to American security. (See, for example, Hubris by David Corn and Michael Isikoff.)
One must credit critics of the war, including Mailer, for foreseeing its difficulties, but then that was not their prime motivation in opposing it. Even Buckley came to regret that the United States blundered into Iraq and failed to secure the victory that might have – might have – reversed the self-destructive tendencies of Arab political culture, but he did not question the motivation or diminish the real threats posed by terrorists whose sole goal is to wreak maximum destruction on those who embrace freedom or Western-inspired democracy. Mailer lashed out, but he offered little in the way of constructive advice, which was typical – he was mostly about sound and fury, however well written or interesting it might be.
Whatever their differences, Buckley and Mailer left an enduring impact on American political culture. Directly and indirectly they inspired and fueled each other. Mailer wrote about Mailer, and Buckley began to write about Buckley, and both produced books fascinating for their unique contributions to political letters – whether Mailer’s stream of consciousness collections of thoughts and essays, his fictional non-fiction or his new journalism style of reporting; Buckley, in the Unmaking of a Mayor, revived the autobiographical political form that Mailer would take up in Armies of the Night. And Buckley’s week-long biographies – Cruising Speed and Overdrive – were attempts at a new form of self-revelation and memoir of the sort Mailer surely must have appreciated. They both took advantage of an era (still with us) when the public hunger for personality was insatiable; and they did us a service of bringing ideas, style and substance into the public domain.
Nonetheless, their differences were profound. Buckley’s own take on Mailer he summed up in one of his last columns, upon Mailer’s death, and it underscored both Buckley’s fascination with the man and his utter contempt for what Mailer wrought in his personal life and on the mores of contemporary America.
How to deal with Norman Mailer? I begin by acknowledging the truth of much that is being said about him, that he was a towering figure in American literary life for 60 years, almost unique in his search for notoriety and absolutely unrivaled in his co-existence with it. Roger Kimball of The New Criterion has written that Mailer "epitomized a certain species of macho, adolescent radicalism that helped to inure the wider public to displays of violence, anti-American tirades, and sexual braggadocio."
. . .
There were other episodes. There was the night in New York when, after dinner, I said I needed to file a column, but he wasn’t ready to go home, pursuing us to our apartment nearby. Wobbling up the steps, his then current wife passed out and was placed by my wife in a spare bedroom. Norman climbed upstairs with me to my study, and spoke disparagingly of the column as, paragraph after paragraph, I gave it to him to read. Finally he said it was time to go home, and we walked down the stairs to where his wife had been taken. But rousing her from that sleep defied any resource we were willing to deploy, so Norman announced fatalistically that, never mind, she would eventually rise, go out the street door, and get a cab. “Me, I’m going home, Slugger,” as he called my wife. I helped him find a cab.
. . .
But Norman Mailer is a towering writer! So why this small talk? Perhaps because it no longer seems so very small. I said about Mailer a few years ago that he created the most beautiful metaphors in the language. I reiterate that judgment. But I go further, wondering out loud whether the obituaries are, finally, drawing attention to the phenomenon of Norman Mailer from the appropriate perspective. The newspaper of record says of him, as though such a profile were routine, that he was married six times, that he nearly killed one wife with a penknife, and that he had nine children. What if he had had seven wives, the seventh of them abandoned there in somebody's bedroom, waiting for a taxi to take her home, any home? Would that have claimed the obituarist's attention?
While Mailer played the Old Testament prophet, Buckley was surely a product of the New Testament. He was a man quick to forgive, full of generosity, not afraid to judge sin, but always cautious in judging the sinner. He opened his home and his life to hundreds if not thousand of people – sinners and saints, famous and obscure, geniuses and common people with whom he was acquainted. While he lacked Mailer’s genius for literary expression and metaphor, he more than equaled Mailer as a conversationalist and political analyst. What he lacked in literary depth, he made up for in basic common sense and decency.
During an exchange with Christopher Hitchens on Peter Robinson’s Uncommon Knowledge, Buckley revisited the Vietnam War and the 1960s. He acknowledged that in hindsight, given the way things turned out, it might have been better had the United States never gone in, though he did not retreat from the notion that the impulse was generous and pro-freedom. He also summed up his attitude about those who engaged in orgiastic frenzies in the 1960s in the name of their own personal brand of idealism. He surely had Mailer in mind.
The fact is that there was kind of a listlessness in the sixties, and that listlessness called for a kind of masturbatory relief. People wanted to find if they could go ahead and get their kicks in some way that they hadn't been getting them, and the more so if they could wed them to some ideal. In fact, what it was was primarily self-concern and an attempt to cast a noble perspective on what it is that you were up to.
Buckley would break ranks with Mailer not simply because, as he once said, Mailer had terrible political judgment but because Mailer broke faith with the cultural values Buckley believed central to civilized culture and life – loyalty, fidelity, decency, kindness, modesty — virtues that Mailer spent a lifetime on the public stage deriding as inconsequential amid the great tides of political and literary history.
Buckley remarked in one 1967 speech to a Catholic audience: "In an age so greatly afflicted by its own failures, by the manifest shortcomings of a liberal culture which seems above all to have succeeded in creating self-disgust, the moment is surely at hand to draw on the special reserves of Christianity — patience, self-denial, undertanding, faith, joy — and to recognize that all that we have learned in the super-sophisticated years of our intellectual maturity is of minor consequence alongside what is revealed to us in the homlies of our faith . . .. (Let Us Talk of Many Things, p. 116)
Buckley acknowledged that conservatism had at best fought the 1960s to a draw, but he nevertheless lamented that the decade encouraged people to explore their fantasies, pleasures and narcissism no matter the cost to others or greater society. The cultural impact of the 1960s was sobering: divorce, pornography, drug use, single-parent families, infidelities, unwed mothers and teen-aged pregnancies all exploded, contributing to enclaves of dysfunctional and destructive behavior that constituted a national disaster. Still, nothing Buckley or the conservatives could say or do could put the genie of excess back in a bottle of moderation and self-restraint.
Norman Mailer, for all his (occasional) claims of being a social conservative, played a prominent role in ushering this age of irresponsibility. He imagined himself a god of sorts, not subject to the same rules as normal, responsible people. Given the strength of his imagination, he might even have convinced himself that he could bring to bear divine powers. But in the end, he was terribly flawed and all too human. Given the pain he endured and inflicted, one would like to think that he learned the virtues of self-restraint in his later years, but his life gave scant evidence for optimism on that score. Moderation of any kind was not a trait that Norman Mailer ever cultivated or embraced. Buckley clearly thought this a tragedy.
shadroui@yahoo.com
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