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304 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1968
...fear of the consequences of this weekend in Washington, for he had known from the beginning it could disrupt his life for a season or more, and there was even the danger it could change him forever. He was forty-four, and it had taken him most of those years to enjoy his pleasures where he found them...it was no time to embark on ventures which could give one more than a few years in jail. Yet, there was no escape.
Along with the likes of Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, which superimposes the style and devices of literary fiction onto fact-based journalism. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_M...
He said a little of what he had thought while watching the other: that he had recognized on this afternoon that the time had come when Americans, many Americans, would have to face the possibility of going to jail for their ideas, and this was a prospect with no cheer because prisons were unattractive places where much of the best in oneself was slowly extinguished, but it could be there was no choice. This war in Vietnam was an obscene war, the worst war the nation had ever been in, and so its logic might compel sacrifice from those who were not so accustomed.
After reading distorted accounts of the demonstration and of his own role in it in Time magazine and in The Washington Post, Mailer began to write his own version in two parts—a novelistic history of himself over four days, followed by a collective history consisting of his own ruminations on the historical context and the significance of the entire event. After recounting his personal experiences as a witness to and participant in the October, 1967, antiwar march, Mailer provided a more detached explanation of the context for the growing opposition to Pentagon policies. Criticizing the misperceptions and distortions of mainstream journalism, he offered an alternative overview of just what happened before, during, and after the incidents he described in the first section of his book. His experience culminated in the creation of The Armies of the Night, a hybrid of history and fiction that, for all of its critique of social disorder, concluded with a paean to America. Source: http://www.enotes.com/topics/armies-n...
The March tomorrow would more or less work or not work. If it didn’t, the Left would always find a new step – the Left never left itself unemployed (that much must be said for the conservative dictum that a man who wants to, can always find work) if the March did more or less succeed, one knew it would be as a result of episodes one had never anticipated, and the results might lead you in directions altogether unforeseen. And indeed how could one measure success or failure in a venture so odd and unprecedented as this? One did not march on the Pentagon and look to get arrested as a link in a master scheme to take over the bastions of the Republic step by step, no, that sort of sound-as-brickwork-logic was left to the FBI. Rather, one marched on the Pentagon because . . . because . . . and here the reasons became so many and so curious and so vague, so political and so primitive, that there was no need, or perhaps no possibility to talk about it yet, one could only ruminate over the morning coffee.
the important thing, the only thing, was to have an action at the Pentagon, because that, given the processing methods of the American newspapers, would be the only thing to come out of the event. Since the American Revolution must climb uphill blindfolded in the long Capitalistic night, any thing which was publicity became a walking stick.
could rarely afford the sophisticated inhibitions of civilization, and so he kept for his survival the art of the primitive, he lived in the enormous present, he subsisted for his Saturday night kicks, relinquishing the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body, and in his music he gave voice to the character and quality of his existence, to his rage and the infinite variations of joy, lust, languor, growl, cramp, pinch, scream and despair of his orgasm.Such prose today feels like it might peel the paint from the walls. As Geoff Shullenberger reminds us, Mailer's most distinguished African-American contemporaries decisively rejected his vision:
Lorraine Hansberry, Ralph Ellison, and especially James Baldwin (an erstwhile Mailer friend and admirer)…objected most of all to Mailer’s celebration of the supposed sexual potency and liberatedness of black men, which they viewed, plausibly, as reiterating the racist stereotypes of the “square” white America Mailer claimed to reject.Hansberry, Ellison, and Baldwin were humanists of great cultivation—Marxist, liberal, Christian—but Mailer's argument, uncomfortable as it may make us in its phrasing today, and much as we can detect its troubling modernist provenance (Freud, Lawrence), was arguably ahead of its time as a proto-postmodern celebration of the decentered subject resisting modern domination through the aleatory flows of his bodies, pleasures, languages, and desires.
a warrior, presumptive general, ex-political candidate, embattled aging enfant terrible of the literary world, wise father of six children, radical intellectual, existential philosopher, hard-working author, champion of obscenity, husband of four battling sweet wives, amiable bar drinker and much exaggerated street fighter, party giver, hostess insulter…One of the roughs, a kosmos! (I note that the wife tally would eventually come to six.) This, I think, is what Adam Gopnik meant when he called The Armies of the Night "a poem," in the same way that certain other American nonfiction classics—Letters from an American Farmer, Walden, The Souls of Black Folk, Slouching Towards Bethlehem—seem to chant or sing rather than to argue or reason. Moreover, as Toni Morrison said, Mailer is often wrong, even to the point of affront; but his positions are never predictable, unintelligent, or without interest. Even at their worst, they are powerfully expressed; art their best, they are often prescient because observant, as Gopnik also notes.
Enough of the old walled town had once remained in the American small town for gnomes and dwarves and knaves and churls (yes, and owls and elves and crickets) to live in the constellated cities of the spiders below the eaves in the old leaning barn which—for all one knew—had been a secret ear to the fevers of the small town, message center for the inhuman dreams which passed through the night in sleep and came to tell their insane tale of the old barbarian lust to slaughter villages and drink their blood….Gnomes? Elves? Talking spiders? Southern Gothic is one thing, but this is too far a flight of fancy even for the nonfiction novel. In any case, the villages of Vietnam were designated for slaughter by "the best and the brightest," not by some insect pogrom spirit of the sticks.
His deepest detestation was often reserved for the nicest of liberal academics, as if their lives were his own life but a step escaped. Like the scent of the void which comes off the pages of a Xerox copy, so was he always depressed in such homes by their hint of oversecurity. If the republic was now managing to convert the citizenry to a plastic mass, ready to be attached to any manipulative gung ho, the author was ready to cast much of the blame for such success into the undernourished lap, the overpsychologized loins, of the liberal academic intelligentsia. They were of course politically opposed to the present programs and movements of the republic in Asian foreign policy, but this political difference seemed no more than a quarrel among engineers. Liberal academics had no root of a real war with technology land itself, no, in all likelihood, they were the natural managers of that future air-conditioned vault where the last of human life would still exist.To be honest, I've had just this thought at just this type of party. Yet Mailer also understands, if dimly, that the college students in revolt, the ones who chant slogans on the prison bus because, as "bright kids" rather than jocks, "they had never traveled on a high school victory bus," will become the powers-that-be someday. Likewise, Mailer's "almost comic obtuseness" about race in several no doubt offensive passages contrasting the protest's Black Power presence ("I'll kill you, Whitey, burn baby") with the "Negro liberals" he'd known at the 1963 March on Washington, nevertheless manages also to register the coming identity politics that will fracture the left as much as anything else.