Mailer on the Conventions, reviewed

Miami and the Siege of Chicago By Norman Mailer World, $5.95 Miami and the Siege of Chicago is two books, not one; it’s also Mailer sober and Mailer drunk. And not to be missed because of its unforgettable prose portraits; not to be missed for an understanding of why the Norman Mailers cannot really understand the good square society in which they live. With Mailer it is almost as simple as the battle of the WASPs and the Have-Nots (Mailer persists in considering himself a have-not although what he has not that he might desire, except Waspdom which he doesn’t—or does he?—is hard to figure). Since it is two books, let’s hit Miami Beach first. Mailer arrives in Miami Beach uncommitted. He is also unsettled, going through a political and emotional crisis triggered by the deaths of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the spring riots and the Poor Peoples’ March. He’s taking personal inventory and makes the uncomfortable admission that “he [Mailer] was getting tired of Negroes and their rights. . . . He was weary to the bone of listening to Black cries of Black superiority in sex, Black superiority in beauty, Black superiority in war . . . the claims were too often uttered by Negroes who were not very black themselves. . . .” By mid-’68 it has become the in-thing to despise old-line liberals, and Mailer does. He despises Nelson Rockefeller for his indecisiveness in going after the nomination (despises him for the same reasons that brought increasing disillusionment with Gene McCarthy). “. He [Rockefeller] called in old debts from friends, hit the hustings in his plane. ‘Hiya fellow,’ —did everything but enter the campaign at the right time, fight it out in the primaries or design his attack for the mollification of Republican fears. -.. In secret he may have detested the Average Republican. . . .” (As we find later there are only two things that Mailer can hang on to, and they’re related: a) the Vietnam war is evil and b) the military-industrial complex is alive, and in the Pentagon, and must be crushed. ) And so, not caring what happens to the Republicans, he reports things as he sees them and the result is exciting, elucidating and scarifying. Rockefeller gets it at every turn: the reporter (as Mailer annoyingly calls himself) is there when Rocky arrives from New York and fails to get the kingsize ovation he needs to prove he really is the Party’s choice. He has a good voice, says the reporter, but. . . “It was an honest voice, sincere, masculine, vibrant, reedy, slightly hoarse, full of honest throatiness of New York. It was a near-perfect voice for a campaigner; it was just a question of whether it was entirely his own or had gravitated to its function.” Ronald Reagan, Mailer dismisses easily, without particular viciousness: “Reagan has a second personality that is younger than the first, very young, boyish, maybe thirteen or fourteen, freckles, cowlick, — I-tripped-on-my-sneaker-lace aw shucks variety of confusion.” When Reagan tells the press with a grin that he honestly doesn’t know whether he is gaining delegates, “as if indeed, gentlemen, he didn’t know, the Press and the delegates listening laughed with him as if there were no harm in Ronald Reagan, not unless the lightning struck.” Nixon is the Republican who ends up interesting the reporter. He meets and likes the Nixon girls, “a man who could produce daughters like that could not be all bad.” (The reporter had arrived knowing Nixon was all bad.) At a hostile press conference some time later, the reporter finds himself asking: “Was it possible that he was a good ~ man, not a bad man .. .?” At a Nixon. reception, he comes to understand why the delegates are for Nixon, something – the Rockefeller forces never fathomed: – It was obvious Nixon had a following after all in these middle-class neatly dressed people moving forward in circumscribed steps . . . . decent respectables who had spent their life in service and now wanted to have a moment near the man who had all of their vote, and so could arouse their happiness, for the happiness of the Wasp was in his mo-— ment of veneration, and they had veneration for Nixon, heir of old Ike—center of happy memory and better days— they venerated Nixon for his service to Eisenhower, and his comeback now—it was his comeback which made him a hero in their eyes, for America is the land which worships the Great Comeback, and so he was Tricky Dick to them no more, but the finest gentleman — in the land; and they were proud to say hello. And when Nixon makes his acceptance ~ speech, Mailer remains puzzled: ‘He [the reporter] did not know if the candidate were real as a man, or whole as a machine, lonely in his sad eminence or megalomaniacal, humble enough to feel the real wounds of the country or sufficiently narcissistic to dream the tyrant’s dream—the reporter did not know. . . .” So to the siege of Chicago. Which starts off beautifully. Here’s Eugene McCarthy: If there was a grave flaw in McCarthy it came out of some penury of his own spirit; too bitter even to express his bitterness, it leaked out of the edges of his wit, turned as punishment upon his own people in the determined bland tone of his presentation in a dramatic hour, and leaking, seemed to get into the very yellow of his skin, his single most unattractive feature. And George McGovern: McGovern was the friendliest man in Chicago. He was a reasonably tall, neatly built man, with-an honest Midwestern face, a sobriety of manner, a sincerity of presentation, a youthfulness of intent. . . . A Christian sweetness came off him like a psychic aroma—he was a fine and pleasant candidate but for that sweetness. _ And poor old Humphrey whose triple initials HHH have an unwitting reference, Mailer takes care to point out, “to barbed-wire fences, concentration camps, gas chambers.” Humphrey! Humphrey spoke three times as long [as McCarthy] trudging through an imprecision of language, a formal slovenliness of syntax which enabled him to shunt phrases back and forth like a switchman, who locates a freight car by moving everything in the yard. _ We get a sudden new insight in an inconclusive meeting with Bobby Kennedy, a vignette that lives. And a curious meeting with McCarthy after the ball is over; when McCarthy of August ’68 comments that he can’t seem to get angry again. “It’s a gift to get angry when you wish to get angry, Mailer.” Which explains a lot about Eugene McCarthy. Then the convention fades in the background. The Yippies and the New Left make the scene and the reporter begins to wonder about himself. Shouldn’t he be in Lincoln and Grant Park with them? Shouldn’t he march in their ranks, take the beatings and the tear gassing and the maceings with some of the compafieros of the march on the Pentagon—with Dave Dellinger, and Allen Ginsberg, Jean Genet, William Burroughs, Terry Southern? Is it that he’s losing his guts? Is he scared of a beating? Where’s Mailer’s machismo? “The reporter took an unhappy look around. Were these unkempt children the sort of troops with whom one wishes to enter battle?” So it goes for page upon page as Mailer wallows in his own emotions and reactions, as he worries about what the kids will think of him, and his prose takes on a frenzied directionless character that reflects his own unresolved dilemma. Take this description of a young white folksinger, And the reporter, caught in the din— had the Huns ever had noise to com- -pare?—knew this was some variety of true song for the Hippies and adolescents in the house, in this enclave of grass and open air (luxury apartments of Lake Shore Drive not five football fields away) crescendos of sound as harsh on his ear, ear of a generation which had danced to “Star Dust,” as to drive him completely out of the sound, these painted dirty under-twenties were | monsters, and yet, still clinging to recognition in the experience, he knew they were a generation which lived in the sound of destruction of all order as he had known it; and worlds of other decomposition as well; there was the sound of mountains crashing in this holocaust of the decibels, hearts bursting, literally bursting, as if this were the sound of death by explosion withi the drum of physiological climax wh the mind was blown… . and on, for 279 more words of the kind until we come, all but engulfed by the rhetoric, to a blessed full stop — to which we clutch as a drowning man to a life-raft. The Siege of Chicago has – turned into the Battle of Mailer, and what happens in the Amphitheatre, first things always being first with Norman Mailer, takes a back seat. With more pruning and less megalomania this could have been a brilliant book; it is only very, very good. — One final observation: in his all too vivid descriptions of the various confrontations between Yippies and cops, Mailer never once mentions that word —you know the one they used to taunt the police. Knowing Mailer, the motive cannot have been one of delicacy. What | about it, Mr. Reporter?