Unfortunately for me, I've only read into the pantheon of Mailer's body of work only superficially. I've read "The Naked and the Dead," "Armies of the Night," and "Miami and the Siege of Chicago." "The Castle in the Forest" sits on my bookshelf, unread. Not to say that it's some unwanted gift or anything, rather, I've just not yet had the time to crack it open. I have seen the terrible, and yet, enthralling video of Rip Torn and Mailer brawling on the set of the movie "Maidstone."
So that's the extent of my experience with Mailer. Probably more than most people, likely less than most of my peers. And I suppose now, I'll be one of those people who get into an author more, only after he or she passes on or gets into some kind of big trouble. At least I wrote an essay on the guy and his book, which I'm going to reproduce here, only because I feel that I owe my friends who read this blog something to chew on. Below you'll find a spot of a review that I did on "Armies of the Night" for a modern journalism class that I took over the summer. It's not particularly good, but I got an 'A' on it, so for what it's worth, it's worth at least that. I was particularly proud of the Robert Lowell reference in there - he's one of my favorite poets and I was pleased to find that he played such a large role in the events depicted in "Armies."
Those tumultuous years of the 1960’s, an era of war, strife, love, hate, and revolution, was the time that Americans upset with the status quo and direction of the Powers-At-Large, came together and coalesced into some sort of miasma of bright paisley argument, streaked with both the cannabis sway of the hippies, and the leather-elbowed tweed of Massachusetts intellectual liberalism. Norman Mailer’s “The Armies of The Night,” subtitled “History As A Novel / The Novel As History,” assumes just that role as it documents the not-so-mutually exclusive circles of left-field society that in one of that generation’s most shining of hours, argued forcefully and with conviction, against the atrocity and injustice of the Vietnam War.
“Armies” is a detail of Norman Mailer’s movements as both a literary provocateur, flush with the success of being one of America’s greater living writers, and as a partisan, willing to march in protest against the Vietnam War. Mailer frames this document from within the schemata of nights spent at social engagements with his intellectual contemporaries, such as Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, etc. Sectioned into vignette-ish chapters that not only explain what is happening (as those events unfolded), but also tell the story in such a way that everything, from a seemingly-insignificant story about an ill-aimed stream of urine, and a confrontation with a member of the American Nazi Party, is of equal importance.
But the march on to the Pentagon is what this book is truly about. 10/21/1967: Mailer, Lowell, and thousands of others went to that five-sided fortress of the American military juggernaut and let those in office know that they simply could not abide by policy and support those actions in the dank, humid jungles of Southeast Asia. “The March 1” from Robert Lowell’s “History” is a succinct distillation of that day:
Under the too white marmoreal Lincoln Memorial
The too tall marmoreal Washington Obelisk,
Grazing into the too long reflecting pool,
The reddish trees, the withering autumn sky,
The remorseless, amplified harangues for peace––
Lovely to lock arms, to march absurdly locked
(unlocking to keep my wet glasses from slipping)
to see the cigarette match quaking in my fingers,
then to step off like green Union Army recruits
for the first Bull Run, sped by photographers,
the notables, the girls…fear, glory, chaos, rout…
our green army staggered out on the miles-long green fields,
met by the other army, the martian, the ape, the hero,
his new-fangled rifle, his green new steel helmet.
Mailer, writing in the third-person, expands upon the events documented in Lowell’s poem, and in his own conversational, spitfire manner of speaking, let’s loose a dense, thick torrent of his own involvement in that day of protest. Mailer himself knew that that particular day was ponderous with its own certain gravity, somewhere “between organized acceptable dissent and incalculable acts of revolution.” (225)
It is this dissent and revolution that paints the picture for the reader. Each page seems to introduce a new character or event. Mailer knows that the commonreader will likely not have a clue as to who most of these people are, but Mailer doesn’t care. A sometimes-cursory introduction and on with the story. But, as noted before, the man is a master storyteller and while reading, it becomes clear that this dense, thick story is also devoid of fluff – there is hardly a wasted word.
Take for instance Mailer’s description of the march’s entrance into the Washington Mall (Lowell’s marmoreal landscape, tinted fatigue green that particular day.) The events were historic and for many, if not all, of those present on the Mall that day in 1967, the scent in the air was of crackling electricity and historical import. Mailer’s acknowledgement of that is just as all-encompassing and turgid as necessary: “Forget that the journalistic information available from both sides is so incoherent, inaccurate, contradictory, malicious, even based on error that no accurate history is inconceivable.” (255)
And like any masterful storyteller, Mailer waits until the very end to drop the Fatman and draw together every stray strand and thought into his Argument. Last page, Mailer shouts “Rush to the locks. God writhes in his bonds. Rush to the locks. Deliver us from our curse. For we must end on the road to that mystery where courage, death, and the dream of love give promise of sleep.” (288) This majestic conclusion is not a synopsis of the preceding 287 pages for the lazy and short-timers, but is instead a way of extending the real events depicted in “The Armies of The Night” into the same canon of work as Mailer’s other fictional pieces. So much for the better, then.
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