The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution (30 page)

The Berkeley speech ratified Mailer’s alliance with the counterculture, much to the dismay of his literary contemporaries in New York, who, despite their vehement objections to the war, didn’t abide by the broad-strokes insurrectionary antics of Rubin and Hoffman; a pull-out from Vietnam would not solve either country’s problems. When the
Parisian Review
published a series of essays on the war in the spring of 1965 with contributions from literary critic Alfred Kazin, writer Norman Podhoretz, and others, along with a joint antiwar statement signed by the writers that tempered criticism of the war with skepticism as to whether the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops would leave the South Vietnamese to an uncertain fate, Mailer led off his contribution with a handwritten note: “Three cheers, lads, your words read like they were written in milk of magnesia.” “A Communist bureaucrat,” he reflected in his essay, “is not likely to do any more harm or destroy any more spirit than a wheeler-dealer, a platoon sergeant, or a corporation executive overseas.” He was distancing himself from the hand-wringing equivocations of the northeastern literary establishment and aligning himself with the front-runners of the youth movement, even if their guerillastyle grit didn’t necessarily square with his own idiosyncratic ideas about public comportment.

Mailer’s affinity for the VDC’s grand ambition to change the consciousness of the country was consistent with what the writer had been trying to do with his writing, particularly his journalism: to burrow into the diseased marrow of American life and restore it to health. Mailer regarded himself as a writer pitched somewhere between the mystic and the rationalist, trying to elevate his readers’ attitudes about justice and virtue through his impassioned prose. Like Rubin and the rest, he agreed that there was a cancer eating away at the country, with its architecture “under the yoke of a monstrous building boom” which “gave promise of being the ugliest in the history of man,” a pharmaceutical industry whose proliferation of “wonder drugs” could trigger a “mass poisoning,” and most important, a military-industrial complex whose Cold War realpolitik could strengthen the very thing it wished to vanquish: “Prosperity was Communism’s poison, but attack from capitalism was its transfusion of blood.”

The Berkeley speech was a transformative experience for many of those activists who were skeptical of Mailer. The truth was that this middle-aged literary eminence could articulate their discontent more eloquently and coherently than could many of the titular leaders of the movement, including Rubin and Hoffman, whose to-the-barricades war chants lacked Mailer’s nuance and moral heft. If Mailer could provide a bridge between the World War II generation and the baby boomers, it would only help their cause.

Mailer, as it turned out, needed the movement as much as it needed him; his involvement in the antiwar cause became a creative supercharger. For a writer whose entire published oeuvre had given off a strong whiff of paranoia over the nefarious workings of powerful American institutions (the anticapitalist rants in the second half of his novel
Barbary Shore
, the shady CIA operatives and their pernicious intentions in 1963’s
An American Dream)
and a healthy ambivalence about what it meant to be a “good American,” the Vietnam War provided a wealth of source material; he would get three books out of it in three years.

Two of those books were nonfiction. Although Mailer’s overarching goal as a writer was “to hit the longest ball in American letters” and perhaps even snag the Nobel Prize, he had moved effortlessly between fiction and nonfiction since the mid-fifties. Journalism was instant gratification for quick pay, a forum for expressing opinions about events that were still playing themselves out, a chance to work through ideas that didn’t necessarily belong in his novels. “Moving from one activity to another makes sense if you do it with a hint of wit or a touch of grace—which I don’t say I’ve always done, far from it,” Mailer told
Playboy
in 1968. “But I think moving from one activity to another can give momentum. If you do it well you can increase the energy you bring to the next piece of work.” Although he thought of nonfiction as stopgap work, his journalism would be Mailer’s greatest literary achievement of the 1960s.

Mailer addressed the Southeast Asian conflict, albeit in highly oblique fashion, in his novel
Why Are We in Vietnam?
published by G. P. Putnam in September 1967. The book’s narrator is Ranald “D. J.” Jethroe, an eighteen-year-old shit-kicking Texan and “disk jockey to the world” with a head full of free-associative jive about the corporation as secular religion, the life-giving properties of horny women, and the emasculation of the Anglo-Saxon male in the face of the Negro’s sexual prowess (shades of “The White Negro”). D. J. and his pal Tex embark on a bear hunt along with D. J.’s father, Rusty, an executive with a plastics company and “the cream of corporation corporateness,” the three of them engorged with bloodlust as a sublimation of unfulfilled sexual urges.

One of Mailer’s pet theories during this period was that malignancy of mind and body could be attributed to the subconscious being out of sync with the conscious. In this case, it is the latent homosexuality of the two boys—their hopelessly displaced sexual energies masked by studly
posturing—that makes a perverse fetish out of violence. The war isn’t mentioned until the last page of the book, but it doesn’t need to be; employing a highly discursive, hipster-slang prose style that reads like a prim Burroughs, Mailer seems to be enamored of the notion that the Anglo-Saxon male’s inability to come to grips with his own maleness leads to porno-violent cataclysms such as Vietnam.

Why Are We in Vietnam?
is a tough slog; aside from the sludgy prose style, Mailer tries too hard to use graphic sexual descriptions as a cudgel to shock his reader. The book was so out of character that critics tended to be either confused or annoyed; the
New York Times’s
Anatole Broyard called it “a third-rate work of art, yet it’s a first-rate outrage to our sensibilities.” Years after its publication, Mailer still regarded it as one of his best books, a successful bid to “transmute myself and create a somewhat ongoing, rampant, inflamed, sort of mad ego.”

A month after the publication of the book, which sold anemically, Mailer received a call from novelist Mitch Goodman. An old Harvard classmate and the husband of Beat poet Denise Levertov, Goodman had made headlines seven months earlier when he organized a protest at the National Book Awards ceremony due to the presence of the ceremony’s guest speaker, Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Goodman wondered if Mailer might participate in a rally and march on the Pentagon that was going to take place in a few weeks’ time.

The march was the brainchild of David Dellinger, a veteran antiwar protester and protégé of A. J. Muste, a pacifist who had been arrested twice during World War II for refusing to enlist. The son of a successful Boston litigator, Dellinger had been the driving force behind the 1964 Lafayette Park demonstration and had met both Rubin and Mailer during the Berkeley teach-in in 1965. Now Dellinger would turn to Rubin to help him organize the Pentagon march, despite their vastly different approaches. Dellinger was averse to centralized leadership and the use of figureheads as protest symbols, and he disdained any provocations that might lead to violent scenes with cops. The idea was to provide spiritual uplift and some meaningful reflection, an approach that was antithetical to Rubin’s confrontational finger-pointing.

But Rubin had a proven track record for mobilizing large groups and drawing media attention with guerilla theater. Four months earlier, Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and a handful of others had sneaked their way
to the third-floor gallery of the New York Stock Exchange and ranted about the corporate sponsorship of the war. After the speech, they tossed fistfuls of cash down to the floor, sending traders into a frenzied scramble that was supposed to symbolize the “death of money” and the corrosive effects of greed on American capitalism. Dellinger couldn’t even conceive of dreaming up such a scheme, but Rubin’s in-your-face style was an asset to the movement.

Mailer had met Dellinger in Berkeley, and Rubin had been his champion there, but two years later activist fatigue had set in. Since the LBJ speech had turned him into a de facto spokesman for the antiwar movement, Mailer had been inundated with requests for speeches and monetary contributions for the cause, and he wanted to woodshed a little, get back down to the business of writing. He was also anxious to edit his self-financed film,
Maidstone
, a loosely structured morality tale about crime and punishment. There was no time for long-winded oratorical marathons, which Mailer found insufferably, terminally dull. As he would write later of himself,

But this march would be different, Goodman assured Mailer; they were going to storm the halls of the Pentagon, shut it down, and immobilize the machinery of military savagery. Mailer conceded that it sounded like an ambitious objective, perhaps the most ambitious operation in the short history of the antiwar movement. “Mitch, I’ll be there,” Mailer told his college friend, “but I can’t pretend I’m happy about it.”

A week later, Mailer received another call, this time from Ed de Grazia, a free-speech lawyer who was organizing an evening of talks at the Ambassador ballroom in Washington two days prior to the march on the Pentagon. Mailer also accepted this invitation with great reluctance.

The impulse behind de Grazia’s event, which was called Artists of Conscience, was to raise bail money for those who might be arrested during the march, but it was also a chance for a few members of the Old Left
to make themselves heard before the march. Joining Mailer would be the brilliant
Esquire
film critic and leftist firebrand Dwight Macdonald, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Robert Lowell (who had been a conscientious objector during World War II), and author Paul Goodman, whose book
Growing Up Absurd
had criticized the stifling “organized systems” of American culture and their deleterious effects on youth.

But waxing platitudinous about the evils of U.S. imperialism was not what Mailer had in mind. The Ambassador event was a starchy circus, a processional of well-behaved liberals reaffirming each other’s assumptions. It was just another academic colloquy, Mailer thought, and thus impotent in the face of the potential violence that thousands of protesters would be confronting over the weekend. A spokesman for the antiwar movement but hardly a card-carrying member of the radical left (he classified his political views as “left conservative”), a major cultural figure but a controversial public one, Mailer felt at loose ends, unsure of his role.

So he got drunk. The drinking began at the dinner party held prior to the Artists of Conscience event, and continued well after the event had started. By the time the six hundred audience members had filed into the Ambassador, a former movie palace that had been retrofitted to accommodate rock concerts, Mailer was nowhere to be found. De Grazia, who had offered Mailer the opening speech, could hold off on starting, but only for so long.

Mailer wasn’t the only one drinking; Lowell was in his cups too, and so were a few other scheduled speakers. De Grazia characterized the atmosphere as “kind of up in the air, chaotic—which was characteristic of the whole movement—but the situation onstage was … well, everyone was just going to do his thing.” An hour after the scheduled start time, de Grazia approached the podium and introduced Goodman, “because he was the soberest.” Mailer entered the auditorium during Goodman’s speech, clutching a copy of
Why Are We in Vietnam?
in one hand and a tin mug of bourbon in the other. And he had to pee, badly. He staggered to the men’s room and, despite missing the commode and relieving himself on the bathroom floor, made it through the packed crowd and walked onstage.

Mailer was enraged that de Grazia hadn’t waited for his opening remarks, as they had agreed, and he lit into the lawyer before approaching
the podium. “He used me as a foil to play off his grandiosity,” said de Grazia. “He liked to do stuff like that because it made him feel alive. Mailer was most comfortable with combative relationships.”

His ensuing speech was the rhetorical inverse of his great address at Berkeley—frustratingly discursive, hostile, sodden. Instead of invoking LBJ as a figure of ridicule, Mailer himself became Johnson’s bête noir, his “dwarf alter ego.” Using a thick southern accent, Mailer unleashed a profane tirade that sounded like an outtake from his last novel. “I pissed on the floor,” he bellowed, sans microphone, at the crowd. “How’s that for Black Power full of white piss? You know all those reporters are going to say it was shit tomorrow. Fuck them. Fuck all of them.” Mailer’s performance was received with catcalls and boos. “I think Mailer was afraid that the crowd was going to throw bottles at him,” said de Grazia.

The next day, a hung-over Mailer arrived late for the draft card demonstration that was being staged outside the Justice Department prior to the official Pentagon march. As the students and academics gathered up their cards in a pile before they were to be proffered to the attorney general, Mailer felt a queasy twinge of self-pity and generational displacement:

Because the Vietnam War was “an obscene war, the worst war the nation had ever been in,” its “logic might compel sacrifice from those who were not so accustomed.” Yes, Mailer would be committed to the event, even risk a few hours in jail, but only to a point. There was a party in New York on Saturday night that he really wanted to attend, so it was best to get arrested early so that he could be released in time to catch a plane back to the city. Despite Mailer’s hand-wringing, it seemed that the latent New York establishment gallivanter in him would prevail.