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Pentagon Pictures: The Civil Divide in Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 March 2010
Abstract
This paper focusses on Norman Mailer's treatment of the 1967 March on the Pentagon in his Pulitzer Prize-winning work of non-fiction The Armies of the Night. The visual and linguistic properties developed by the author throughout the first book of The Armies of the Night are identified and assessed in relation to the anti-war movements and counterculture temperament of the 1960s. Comparisons are made with post-war writers and earlier North American authors as a means of clarifying “American” aspects of Mailer's handling of his material. Mailer's journalistic techniques, his often spontaneous and engaged responses, are also defined within the context of the social conflicts of the late 1960s.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010
References
1 Norman Mailer, Cannibals and Christians (New York: Double Day Dell, 1966), 82.
2 Maurice Isserman, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 190.
3 Frank Norris, The Octopus (London: Penguin, 1986; first published 1901), 646.
4 Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968), 54.
5 Ibid., 47.
6 Ibid., 47.
7 William O' Neill, An Informal History of America in the 1960s: Coming Apart (New York: New York Times Book Company, 1971), 244. O'Neill accurately predicted that “posterity will doubtless think the March on the Pentagon remarkable mainly for the book it inspired.”
8 Paul Johnson, A History of the American People (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997), 738.
9 Ibid., 746.
10 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter and Other Tales (London: Penguin Books, 1986; first published 1850), 83, 108, 172. Nathaniel Hawthorne had previously used the “painterly” or pictorial technique in The Scarlet Letter, with various “views of Hester”: Hester as the Madonna with Infant; Hester at her Needle; Hester on the Scaffold with a Scarlet “A” on her breast.
11 Mailer, The Armies of the Night, 126.
12 Barry H. Leeds, The Structured Vision of Norman Mailer (New York: New York University Press, 1969), 251. Leeds, on this issue, suggests that Mailer is oblivious to the gravity that is lacking in the proceedings. In reference to Mailer's description of fear at the Pentagon, Leeds argues, “These dangers are very real to Mailer, but to a reader who does not share his political views they may seem chimerical.”
13 Mailer, The Armies of the Night, 128.
14 Ibid., 19.
15 In his Civil War poem “The Wound-Dresser” Whitman stands level with the wounded on both sides: “Was one side so brave? The other was equally brave!”
16 Mailer, The Armies of the Night, 33.
17 Lillian Ross, Portrait of Hemingway (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961), 48. Ross obliges Hemingway by presenting him in a series of postures/pictures.
18 Alfred Kazin, “The Trouble He's Seen,” in Leo Braudy, ed., A Collection of Critical Essays on Norman Mailer (New York: Prentice Hall Inc., 1972), 63. In this review for the New York Times Kazin refers to the lack of “outrageousness, strength, and imagination” and the absence of the “Kennedy Panache” among Mailer's fellow protestors.
19 Peter Manso, Mailer: His Life and Times (Harmondsworth: Viking, 1985), 305.
20 Mailer, The Armies of the Night, 213.
21 Octavio Paz, Conjunctions and Disjunctions, trans. Helen R. Lane (London: Viking Press, 1975), 136. Paz analyses the shooting of students by the Mexican army and police on 2 Oct. 1967 in the Plaza de Tlatelolco.
22 D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (London: Penguin Books, 1967), 7.
23 Robert Merrill, “The Armies of the Night,” in Harold Bloom, ed., Modern Critical Views: Norman Mailer (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986), 132.
24 Leo Braudy, “The Pride of Vulnerability,” in idem, A Collection of Critical Essays, 15. Braudy is the first to group the documentary novels together as a trilogy: “The Prisoner of Sex acts as a coda to this trilogy because it asserts what had been implicit through them: the primacy of the writer who attempts, however subjectively, to understand the world around him and convey to his audience some sense of its complexity.”
25 Norman Mailer, Saint George and the Godfather (New York: The World Publishing Company, 1972), 116.
26 Mailer, The Armies of the Night, 114.
27 Ibid., 257.
28 Ibid., 171.
29 F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (London: Penguin Books, 2000; first published 1925), 171. Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1989), 47, sees this as a case for male rule over both wife and country.
30 Mailer, The Armies of the Night, 116.
31 Ibid., 288.
32 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (London: Penguin Books, 1986; first published 1855), 62.
33 Mailer cites the article “A Shaky Start” in Time (27 Oct. 1967) as an example of inaccurate coverage of his behaviour during the four-day weekend. Although the article does not misrepresent his words or actions factually, it discredits, as “History as a Novel” indicates, his involvement.
34 Mailer, The Armies of the Night, 255.
35 Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 26.
36 Mailer, The Armies of the Night, 255.
37 Jeffords, 24. Although the argument here aligns Mailer's approach to earlier American writers, Jeffords' position –that Mailer's autobiographical technique is based on Vietnam narratives – is viable: “the personal experience is the ‘documentary’ of the war.”
38 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “History,” in Emerson: Essays and Poems, ed. Christopher Bigsby (London: J. M. Dent, 1995), 21.
39 Richard Gilman, The Confusion of Realms (New York: Random House, 1969), 87.
40 W. J. Weatherby, Squaring Off: Mailer v Baldwin (London: Robson Books, 1977), 161. Weatherby associates Joyce's epic day in Dublin with Mailer's weekend in Washington.
41 Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 44.
42 Mailer, The Armies of the Night, 13.
43 Martin Green, “Norman Mailer and the City of New York: Faustian Radicalism,” in Braudy, Critical Essays on Norman Mailer, 119. Green first notes the detail which Mailer goes into in describing his anatomy.
44 Mailer, The Armies of the Night, 122.
45 Kazin, “The Trouble He's Seen,” 62.
46 Morris Dickstein, Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 158. Dickstein, in reference to this book, speaks of “the self's hunger to kidnap history and become its agent.”
47 Henry Miller, The Tropic of Capricorn (London: Harper Perennial, 2005; first published 1938), 12.
48 Mailer, The Armies of the Night, 129.
49 Jack Richardson, ‘The Armies of the Night’ in Bloom, Modern Critical Views: Norman Mailer, 28.
50 Frederick Karl, American Fictions (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1985), 580.
51 Mailer, The Armies of the Night, 38.
52 Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 62.
53 Mailer, The Armies of the Night, 50.
54 McElroy, Joseph, “Neural Neighbourhoods and Other Concrete Abstracts,” Tri Quarterly, 34 (1975), 198–218Google Scholar, 215. McElroy dismisses Mailer's claim to a representative position in The Armies of the Night: “through some freak frequency in the urine sparkling night of missed connections, Inside Norman might come to equal America.”
55 Lisa Phillips, “Beat Culture, America Revisioned,” in idem, Beat Culture and the New America: 1950–1965 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1996), 37. Philips clarifies the extent of performance literature in Beat writing.
56 Mailer, The Armies of the Night, 44.
57 Ibid., 40.
58 Karl, American Fictions, 99.
59 Mailer, The Armies of the Night, 54.
60 Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Bantam, 1961). Stein describes herself through the testimony of her first-person narrator. In terms of the cubist influence on the use of this technique, Mailer had also been contracted to write a biography of Pablo Picasso in the year before the March on the Pentagon, and registered the cubist painter's influence on his work when he eventually composed the biography thirty years later.
61 Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977; first published 1854), 5.
62 Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 69.
63 Paz, Conjunctions and Disjunctions, 134.
64 Martin Green, “Norman Mailer and the City of New York: Faustian Radicalism,” in Braudy, Critical Essays on Norman Mailer, 112. Green refers to the spontaneity of Mailer's approach to The Armies of the Night.
65 Mailer, The Armies of the Night, 213.
66 Ibid., 34.
67 Ibid., 33.
68 Manso, Norman Mailer: His Life and Times, 463. Sandy Charlesbois Thomas reports Mailer “putting in ten, twelve, sometimes fourteen hour days” to ensure the book would be published in the months directly after the march.
69 Mailer, The Armies of the Night, 215.
70 Ann Charters, “Introduction,” in Jack Kerouac, On the Road (London: Penguin Books, 1991; first published 1957), xxvi.