The Weekend Revolution

THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT by Norman Mailer. 288 pages. New American Library. $5.95.

Early in this book, the author reports that Poet Robert Lowell remarked to him: "Norman, I really think you are the best journalist in America." Mailer refused to take it as a compliment. "Well, Cal," he replied, "there are days when I think of myself as being the best writer in America."

Lowell was offering up the current intellectuals' line on Mailer, and Norman was mouthing the perennial Mailer line on himself ("Me Mailer. Me champ"). But The Armies of the Night suggests that Lowell is wrong, and that Mailer may be closer to the truth. He is a rather lazy and often sloppy journalist, but he can still write like a streak. Whether that makes him the best writer in America is open to question, but this book, which Mailer labels "History as a Novel" and "The Novel as History," is a bravura performance.

Buoyant Bending. Since the work had ample exposure in Harper's magazine and Commentary, it is widely known by now that this is Mailer's attempt to build a Washington monument by providing a step-by-step account of what in the present perspective seems like a decidedly minor news event: the peace march and militant demonstration in Washington last October. Mailer does indeed cover all the accepted journalistic steps, from the ceremonial handing-in of draft cards at the Department of Justice to the activists' vain roughhouse attempts to storm the Pentagon.

But more important is the omnipresent hand of a born novelist, buoyantly bending and shaping each scene to his literary way, and successfully creating a single, superb, comic figure of the author himself. With a courageous measure of self-mockery, Mailer casts himself in the role of a black-humor antihero: a hard-drinking, self-important and snobbish dandy who, believing himself the star, is forever stumbling toward the camera, when all the time he is really only an extra, a bit player who will inevitably be cut out of the film.

Bark & Bite. Mailer indulges his hero with a splendid deadpan pomposity, reinforced by the fact that he refers to himself throughout in the third person. The reader first meets him in his Brook lyn Heights apartment, picking up a ringing telephone as if it were a pistol loaded for Russian Roulette. "On impulse, thereby sharpening his instinct as a gambler, he took spot plunges: once in a while he would pick up his own phone. On this morning in September, 1967, he lost his bet." The caller is a militant antiwar organizer and old Harvard classmate, who extracts from Mailer a promise to participate in the Washington protests and thus give up a valuable weekend. The lost weekend really starts off when Norman, very much in his bourbon cups at a fund-raising evening in a theater, urinates on the floor of a darkened men's room. He then goes on to bully his fellow speakers with arrogant bluster and to bawdy his audience with testy obscenity--for which he offers a spirited defense. He uses it to wake up people, he claims. Besides, he discovered in the Army that it is the common man's humor and, in a way, the voice of his history ("the truth of the way it really felt over the years passed on a river of obscenity").

Mailer evokes some marvelously mordant closeups of his fellow "weekend revolutionaries" as they try to do their ritualistic protest thing quickly, so that they can get back to New York for a dinner party. "Lowell's shoulders had a slump," writes Mailer. "One did not achieve the languid grandeurs of that slouch in one generation--the grandsons of the first sons had best go through the best troughs in the best eating clubs at Harvard before anyone in the family could try for such elegant note." Ideologue Paul Goodman "looked like the sort of old con who had first gotten into trouble in the Y.M.C.A. and hadn't spoken to anyone since."

But Mailer always returns to himself. With an "egotism of curious disproportions," he catalogues his breakfast menus, his cures for the common cancers, even the virtues of each of his four wives. Sometimes he is the little boy full of comic-strip fantasies about riding around in a red helicopter, taking on the whole might of the U.S. Air Force and of "corporation-land" by shooting paint at the enemy choppers. At other times he fancies himself an exiled princeling (though from what country defies the imagination).

Often, he reveals himself as an archconservative who dislikes mass man and the whole modern era with its shoddy workmanship--one can almost see him in an English county seat decrying the servant problem and denouncing Labour amid outraged pipe smoke. He accurately describes himself as neo-Victorian in regard to sex; he speaks ill of homosexuality and masturbation, and proclaims that "without guilt, sex was meaningless." In fact, one sometimes wonders whether Mailer is not really an undercover agent of the old order, trying to undermine the Left from within.

Bellicose Charm. The Armies of the Night occasionally suffers from the languor that inevitably descends upon any one-character work. And it is not with out Mailer's usual excesses. He enjoys his own jokes too inordinately; he protests his right to protest too much, with some of the purplest prose apotheosizing America written since the rhetorical mauve of Thomas Wolfe ("Brood on that country who expresses our will. She is America, once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled . . . tender mysterious bitch"). For the most part, his genuine wit and bellicose charm, and his fervent and intense sense of legitimately caring, render The Armies of the Night an artful document, worthy to be judged as literature.

However, as journalism--which is history's fief in time--the book is another matter. Mailer is pretentious about Marxism. When he suggests that it would not really matter if all Asia went Communist, because expansion only creates problems for Communism, he is, at best, playful or naive. He brilliantly employs the suggestive, evocative devices of the new journalists--or old novelists. But he suggests too much, and evokes too wildly. He looks into the faces of the U.S. marshals and reads in them the notion that Viet Nam is where the "American small town" gets its "kicks." And he fails to note as a sound journalist would, that there were U.S. marshals just like these who escorted James Meredith through crowds of rednecks at the University of Mississippi. He also has visions of future concentration camps in America (with Muzak)--a fantasy worthy of a propagandist or novelist, but hardly a reporter.

In the past dozen years, Mailer has developed cop-out infatuation with amateur journalism. During that time he wrote only two interesting but indifferent novels, An American Dream and Why Are We in Viet Nam? Ernest Hemingway, Mailer's onetime hero, also engaged in journalism but noted that "it blunts the instrument you write with." It may be time for Mailer to heed that warning.

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