The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution (32 page)

The third-person technique liberated Mailer from the reductive “housing projects of fact and issue” that he felt prevented traditional reportage from examining the often complex matrix of impulses and root causes behind a mammoth act of resistance such as the march on the Pentagon—its decentralized command structure, the prevarications among the nonstudent academics and fellow travelers among Mailer’s tweedy contemporaries, and the warring philosophies between Dellinger and Rubin that threatened to derail the objectives of the march. But more important, it freed up Mailer to write about himself in a clinically detached way—to map his own complex motives, emotions, and impressions as carefully as he might delineate a character in a novel. He would become a “true protagonist of the best sort… half-heroic, and three-quarters comic.”

Once Mailer began writing as “Mailer,” the words came at a furious clip. The third-person device enabled him to transition freely between public events and interiority and write as discursively as he pleased. After six weeks of work in Provincetown, he called Decter and told her, “It’s getting long.”

But the magazine’s deadline was approaching, and Mailer was still writing. If the story was going to make it into the March issue, then Morris and Decter would have to trudge up to Provincetown and start preparing the still incomplete manuscript. Shortly after the first of the year, Decter and Morris flew up the Cape in a puddle-jumper that gave Decter wretched flight sickness. The two editors arrived at Mailer’s three-story redbrick retreat on Cape Cod Bay, where a hothouse atmosphere of industriousness prevailed. Sandy Charlebois was dutifully typing Mailer’s handwritten story, while the writer, who was ensconced in his office on the second floor for twelve-to fourteen-hour stretches, produced more pages. In six weeks, Mailer had produced almost eighty thousand words—a messy and frequently amended assemblage, with countless notes scribbled in the margins and serpentine sentences wrapped around paragraphs. A makeshift distribution system was put into place: Charlebois retrieved the pages from Mailer and typed. Mailer made corrections and handed the manuscript pages to Morris, who made his notes. Decter then read the pages, rewriting Mailer’s crabbed
handwritten changes in legible type to eliminate the need for another draft. Mercifully, the editing was minimal. “The kind of editing one does with him is to say, ‘In this part here you really should explain a little more. You go over that a little too fast—it’s hard for the reader to follow the point you’re making,’” said Decter. “That kind of stuff, but that’s not editing, and he was never testy about any of these suggestions. Mailer’s an absolute pro.”

A third of the way into Mailer’s manuscript, Morris knew he had something special on his hands. But it was far longer than the original projection of twenty thousand words. When Decter and Morris did the final count, it topped out at ninety thousand. Morris called Kotlowitz:

When Kotlowitz finally read the story, he was “mesmerized and stunned. There was no question we had to do it in full. I didn’t think the piece was inflated by a single word. The momentum and propulsion of the piece was so powerful. I was so excited; it was an editor’s dream. I knew that no one, upon reading the story, would forget this issue.”

John Cowles wasn’t so sure. The conservative publisher of
Harper’s
, whose family owned the magazine as well as the
Minneapolis Star-Tribune
newspaper, felt the story was far too long and too enamored of the leaders of the left as front-runners in a social revolution. “He was bewildered by it,” said Kotlowitz. “Nor did he advocate devoting an entire issue to a single piece, because it would set a bad precedent for other writers wishing to do the same.”

Even some
Harper’s
staffers were bewildered by the piece. When a copy editor questioned whether the crude language was suitable for a
mainstream magazine, and sarcastically wondered how Mailer might write when he was sober, “Willie told her to sit down, shut up, and not say a word,” according to Decter. But even Mailer had second thoughts about the use of so much scatology. When the editing was finally complete and Morris and Decter were about to head back to New York, Mailer turned to Morris and asked, “What will my father think?”

“The Steps of the Pentagon,” which ran in the March 1968 issue of
Harper’s
, was a dazzler, the greatest sustained work of reportage that Mailer had written thus far—reportage in the Mailer sense, at least. “The Steps of the Pentagon” was a multihued tableau: a vividly impressionistic account of the march, a clear-eyed critique of the left and its leadership, a series of spot-on profiles of Lowell, Macdonald, and other prominent participants, and a self-portrait of the writer as an “ambiguous comic hero,” constantly vacillating between doing the right thing and catering to his own questionable self-interests. In less capable hands, the story might have read as a confused jumble, but Mailer’s ability to pleasingly syncretize the disparate parts lifted “The Steps of the Pentagon” into the realm of nonfiction literature.

Mailer’s third-person device, which he had questioned from the very start, allowed him to write about himself as a protagonist in the march but also a character for whom he gives no quarter.

Mailer’s gift for using careful observation as a psychological divining rod had never been utilized as effectively. Here’s Mailer writing about Lowell’s reaction to Mailer’s soused speech at the Ambassador:

Mailer resents Lowell for his confident command of the Ambassador audience during his poetry reading: “Lowell’s talent was very large, but then Mailer was a bulldog about the value of his own talent. No, Mailer was jealous because he had worked for this audience, and Lowell without effort seemed to have stolen them.” (Years later, Lowell would comment that Mailer’s piece was “one of the best things ever written about me.”)

Mailer views the marchers as artists in their own right, appropriating the iconic images of popular culture and subverting them into the pagaentry of a freak parade:

Mailer is constantly shifting between enthusiasm and enervation in “The Steps of the Pentagon.” Look to the feel of the phenomenon, Dwight Macdonald had told him; “If it feels bad, it
is
bad.” Nothing is excised for propriety’s sake, neither the pissing incident at the Ambassador nor Mailer’s contempt for middle-class liberalism and its phony pieties (“He had no sense of belonging to any of these people. They were much too nice and much too principled for him”), his timidity in the face of law enforcement, his “gloomy hope” for the children of the
march, “twenty generations of buried hopes perhaps engraved in their chromosomes, and now conceivably burning like faggots in the secret inquisitional fires of LSD.” The march, Mailer agrees, was a just and proper demonstration of outrage, but is the left really any match for the infernal power of “technology land”? It was the same dialectic that Mailer pondered in “Superman Comes to the Supermarket”: Can a nation beholden to consumer culture be transformed by a movement that wanted to banish its coarsening impediments to social reform?

Thus “The Steps of the Pentagon” worked on two levels: as an adroit disquisition on the events surrounding the march, but also a speculative essay about a nation that had sacrificed its ingenuity on the altar of technology and the corporation, and loosed its wild, untamed energies upon imaginary enemies using the Cold War as its organizing principle.

But there is also a generosity of spirit, however grudgingly offered, in Mailer’s clear-eyed examination of both his motives and those of the other participants on both sides of the barricade. He’s acutely observant
and
shrewdly self-aware. If the marshals seethe with malice, it’s only because they are products of social engineering, the Pentagon’s malleable instruments of power. He is capable of empathetic feelings for his enemies, even if they are merciless oppressors.

As for Mailer’s own motivations, they are never reconciled. His short time as an imprisoned detainee presents him with a moral dilemma—to do right by the movement or by his family, to serve whatever sentence might await him or scramble back to the comforts of his middle-class life. Instead of the polemical flame-thrower, here is Mailer offering himself up as flawed and vulnerable to feelings of cowardice and shame. “To have his name cheered during a season at every deadly dull leftist meeting
to raise money—he would trade such fame for a good hour’s romp with the—yes, doomed
pater familias
—with the wife and kids.”

When Mailer, after considerable negotiation on the part of his lawyers, is released on bail pending appeal, he feels cleansed and possessed of something virtuous, even beatific, at its core, “not unlike the rare sweet of a clean loving tear not dropped, still held.” But to what extent had the protest and its aftermath impacted the consciousness of the country? Mailer isn’t entirely sure. “Some promise of peace and new war seemed riding the phosphorescent wake of this second and last day’s siege of the Pentagon, as if the country were opening into more and more on the resonance of these two days, more that was good, more that was bad.”

“The Steps of the Pentagon” inspired more letters than any other article in the century-plus history of
Harper’s
. Some readers of the magazine were outraged at Mailer’s language and requested subscription cancellations. Others were delighted to find such a nuanced take on the present American crisis in the pages of the magazine. Mailer was taken aback by the avalanche of letters that had flooded into
Harper’s
offices. “All these people sitting all over America writing these letters,” he told Morris. “They’re carrying on a conversation with a magazine as if a magazine itself were a human being.”

Mailer had another section prepared for publication—“The Battle of the Pentagon,” a thirty-thousand-word examination of the origins of the march, a careful analysis of the sectarian battles and failures of the Old Left and new guard, and the price paid in violence and bloodshed—but Morris rejected it for space reasons. In hindsight, he was right to turn it down; “The Battle of the Pentagon” lacks narrative punch because Mailer isn’t in on the action as a character. Instead, Decter’s husband, Norman Podhoretz, published it in the April issue of
Commentary
.

When New American Library published both articles in book form as
The Armies of the Night
, it brought Mailer the best reviews of his career since
The Naked and the Dead. The Nation’s
Alan Trachtenberg singled out Mailer’s “brilliantly demonstrated coincidence between the objective event and the subjective experience” and regarded the book as nothing less than a “permanent contribution to our literature—a unique testimony to literary responsiveness and responsibility.” Henry S. Resnik in the
Saturday Review
praised Mailer’s “amazing stylistic virtuosity” and “breathtaking verbal cadenzas.” In his lead review of
The Armies of the
Night
in the May 5, 1968,
New York Times Book Review
, Alfred Kazin compared Mailer to Walt Whitman, another writer who “staked his work on finding the personal connection between salvation as an artist and the salvation of his country.” Kazin found Mailer’s balancing act as a reporter of the personal and the political as dexterous an amalgam as Whitman’s great Civil War diary, “Specimen Days.” “Mailer’s intuition in this book is that the times demand a new form,” Kazin wrote. “He has found it.”

In 1969, Mailer was awarded both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer prize in nonfiction for
The Armies of the Night
.