The Novelist, The Beast, The Citizen

I first read Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night in my middle-teenage years, a time when I was a pitiable sweat-and-tears mixture of anger, idealism, and profound naiveté.

To illustrate: it was around this time, having read perhaps halfway through a history of the Chinese Revolution – an account whose romantic bias in no way alarmed me – no matter – I was inspired to paint a red star on the lapel of my jacket. I tried to hide the star from my mom, who surely would have given me an oral examination on the subject of revolution, generally, and Maoism, specifically. I would have had no cogent responses and would have felt very silly indeed. I soon painted over the star.

At this time, too, I read about the SDS and the Weather Underground, I read War Resisters in Prison; I pawed through anything relating to Civil Rights, Women’s Rights, the Antiwar Movement, the Chinese Revolution, Gay Rights, Black Power, the American Indian Movement; Emma Goldman though not much else to do with Russia, Castro’s Cuba, and so on. Much of what I read was pretty good, some was very smart indeed, and most of it is a blur to me now. I mean, a lot of this stuff was also very dry reading. Among a few books that I recall – and with fondness – is Armies of the Night. Mailer was like this light-beam from the heavens amid so much gloomy text, text, text. He was energetic and brazen, arrogant and opinionated, and yet he did not take a hard and fast position. This last fact is what made the book a revelation to me. It gave me an immensely pleasurable, instructive, and less-obstructed view of what it was like, in the ten or fifteen years before I came to be, that fueled so much of my parents’ lives.

Understand: not long after his high school graduation in the mid-1960’s, my father lived a solid year in prison rather than serve in Vietnam. And my mom was wound up tightly with all sorts of antiwar activity beginning around 1968 when she left her husband.

Until I read Armies, though, when my mom talked politics, more often than not I’d roll my eyes. (Oh, great: first I’m not allowed to watch Taxi and now you’re dragging me to a meeting about lead paint. Can I get some Garbage Pail Kids, please?) (Harrumph: another draft board action story. I’m going out. I don’t know when I’ll be home.) (So the government wants to bury toxic waste in the next state over. Guess what, Ma? Your revolution failed. The world is doomed.)

I harbored the attitude because I sensed too much self-importance in my parents’ activism and subsequent nostalgia, and this just ripped my own sense of self-importance apart. I was the kid. I wanted to be the center. I wanted to learn about this crap on my own and not through their biases. And I’m sure it had something to do with having a stressed-out and overworked mom, with being abandoned by a father more interested in politics and agitation than his child. Pop psychology. That stuff: I’m over it. 

Whatever it was that made me resent their past lives, suffice it to say that nothing really changes until it does. With Mailer I found this funny, cynical, sardonic, altogether other view of that America, and it lent color and validity to my folks’ stories. He made exciting and undeniable fact of those previously-grating reminiscences in ways that no old newspaper article or stuffy academic polemic had done, and in ways that I sure as hell wasn’t ready to hear from my parents. 

There’s much about Armies of the Night that I’m sure I didn’t appreciate on the first go-round. I’m certain I glossed over the last third, where the Novelist passes his baton to the Historian. But now – my goodness! Up until the Novelist takes his bow, Mailer has paraded himself around, a highly entertaining hero in his own book. And then suddenly: Them’s the facts, Ma’am. Once, a “prisoner of his own egotism, some large vital part of the March had ended for him with his own arrest,” now we have a journalist, all business, uncovering the entire weekend’s bigger picture. Once, “trusting no one else in these matters – certainly not the columnists and the commentators – would never know whether the Reverend King had given a great speech that day,” now seeking to reveal all that he missed; to tell about the armies of bikers and hippies and to flesh out the beatings that took place that weekend.

I called my mom to see what she remembered about Mailer, about Armies of the Night, about the mid-to-late sixties. “The only thing I remember about that book is him going on stage drunk and railing about how he’d just taken an amazing shit! [Sic: wasn’t it a major, desperate piss on the floor of a public restroom?] I don’t know if I have much to say about him. He was so peripheral to everything. Anyway I wasn’t at that march.” (And what of that time period? Where were you in 1967?) “I was raiding draft boards!” (No, Ma. Not in 1967, you weren’t. That was later.) “Listen, I’m at an Occupy meeting. I’ll call you back in a few hours.” As promised, she called me back in a few hours. “I remembered where I was in 1967! I was still in Japan with Hal. I think we came back to live in Baltimore in November of that year. I was miserable. I wanted to get a divorce but I needed money. So I started looking at the classifieds and ended up working for the American Friends Service Committee in Washington, DC. My first big demonstrations were in 1968. Draft board actions maybe 1969.” (Okay. Any other thoughts on Mailer? Besides the piss? Do you remember the book and did you think it was a fair account?) “Do I remember the book? Ellie: you know how my memory is.” (Okay. Thanks, Ma. I love you.)

My father, on the other hand – his mind is a steel trap. He’s largely self-taught. Last time I saw him he was reading a book in French. I said “I didn’t know you ever studied French,” and he said “Oh, I guess I’ve always just sort of figured it out as I went along. Better than reading a shit translation.” He’s a cynical bastard. He could tear Howard Zinn a new asshole if he had a mind to: none of our heroes are safe. The one time I thought it right to introduce my father to a boyfriend (we were both rooted in the Boston area, were visiting our respective families there, were madly in love, were beginning, together, what would prove to be a horrible year of make-believe, etc.), this boyfriend – an apolitical Spanish language sociolinguistics geek – this boyfriend brought up Noam Chomsky at our lunch. As a result, we were all subjected to my father’s acid retort – a Boston-nasal diatribe on the Many Deficits of Chomsky. Which was not the point, of course; Noam was but a pawn in this unfortunate game of meet and greet.

Anyway.

I feel certain that my dad has read Mailer, has read Armies of the Night, remembers the latter well, and has an opinion on both. I suspect my father wouldn’t have held back like Mailer did when he bunked with young Noam Chomsky on the night of the mass arrests at the Pentagon. I tried to reach my dad for comment but he has, thus far, declined to respond. (Thanks for nothing, pop.) 

As for me, the darling daughter: I adore Mailer at all of his different ages and with each of his many faces: the Novelist, the Beast, the Citizen. Because he was not beholden to any sect, because he felt that political parties would be better off with motorcycle gang names, because he harbored mistrust of the Press, where “nuances were forever being munched like peanuts,” and criticized the New Left for being wimpy and complicit, because he said “the Hawks were smug and self-righteous, the Doves were evasive of the real question,” and then concluded, simply, that Vietnam was a very bad war, because he loved filth and vice, and he sucked the boring out of my family’s nostalgia: I love Armies of the Night for all of that, and I love it for helping me to understand where I come from.

eap, October 2011 - “the Beast term”