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A Mysterious Country: The Grace and Fragility of American Democracy
Published on the centenary of Norman Mailer’s birth, a timely and urgent call to preserve our democracy.
From his bestselling first novel, The Naked and the Dead, to his last work, American democracy was a lifelong project for Norman Mailer. It was his grand theme. Nearly all of his books touched on the pros and cons, the strengths and weaknesses, the grace (to use his word) and fragility of the American experiment as well as the threats to it—from autocratic leaders and a complacent citizenry, from violent protest and radical conservative assaults on it, from “soft fascism” and the ills of racism and poverty. In the sharp and impassioned language of a political Cassandra and with the eye of a novelist and journalist, he explored the underlying psychological, social, and economic causes of the country’s fragile polity and offered urgent prescriptions for its reinvigoration.
A Mysterious Country is a carefully selected collection of Mailer’s most incisive—and sometimes remarkably prophetic—commentary on American democracy and what must be done to safeguard it. The anthology draws on both published and unpublished sources, from Mailer’s great works of narrative nonfiction and novels as well as essays, interviews, letters, speeches, and talk show appearances. It includes pungent remarks on every president from FDR through George W. Bush, as well as correspondence with several. Throughout, what shines through is Mailer’s passion for our democratic project—as well as the freedom that comes with it—and a keen awareness of its potential for failure, its virtues, and what is required of us to keep it intact.
From his bestselling first novel, The Naked and the Dead, to his last work, American democracy was a lifelong project for Norman Mailer. It was his grand theme. Nearly all of his books touched on the pros and cons, the strengths and weaknesses, the grace (to use his word) and fragility of the American experiment as well as the threats to it—from autocratic leaders and a complacent citizenry, from violent protest and radical conservative assaults on it, from “soft fascism” and the ills of racism and poverty. In the sharp and impassioned language of a political Cassandra and with the eye of a novelist and journalist, he explored the underlying psychological, social, and economic causes of the country’s fragile polity and offered urgent prescriptions for its reinvigoration.
A Mysterious Country is a carefully selected collection of Mailer’s most incisive—and sometimes remarkably prophetic—commentary on American democracy and what must be done to safeguard it. The anthology draws on both published and unpublished sources, from Mailer’s great works of narrative nonfiction and novels as well as essays, interviews, letters, speeches, and talk show appearances. It includes pungent remarks on every president from FDR through George W. Bush, as well as correspondence with several. Throughout, what shines through is Mailer’s passion for our democratic project—as well as the freedom that comes with it—and a keen awareness of its potential for failure, its virtues, and what is required of us to keep it intact.
- GenresNonfictionPolitics
336 pages, Hardcover
Published January 31, 2023
3 people are currently reading
40 people want to read
About the author
Norman Mailer
343 books1,419 followersNorman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director.
Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, but which covers the essay to the nonfiction novel. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize twice and the National Book Award once. In 1955, Mailer, together with Ed Fancher and Dan Wolf, first published The Village Voice, which began as an arts- and politics-oriented weekly newspaper initially distributed in Greenwich Village. In 2005, he won the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from The National Book Foundation.
Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, but which covers the essay to the nonfiction novel. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize twice and the National Book Award once. In 1955, Mailer, together with Ed Fancher and Dan Wolf, first published The Village Voice, which began as an arts- and politics-oriented weekly newspaper initially distributed in Greenwich Village. In 2005, he won the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from The National Book Foundation.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 11, 2023
Norman Mailer, who died in 2007, wrote numerous prophetic words about our current era's political troubles. This volume offers an impressive collection of these. One prophesy is telegraphed early in “A Mysterious Country” with this quotation from Mailer: "huge forces in America that are promoting fascism in one way or another.” Perhaps the most often quoted words of Mailer on ominous developments in the United States are ones from the 1968 "Miami and the Siege of Chicago" on the conflicts then raging- - between anti-war protestor and militarist, old and young – that end with Mailer’s writing that the conflicting forces will be: "be fighting for forty years.”
However, Mailer’s prophetic acuity regarding the fragility of U.S democracy, like much else, rested in part on Mailer’s affinities with the ostensible targets of his criticism. As Harold Bloom wrote in "Novelists and Novels," Mailer’s validity as a cultural critic is always qualified by his own immersion in what he censures." To wit, Mailer's views reveal a world inhabited to an unusual extent by Mailer himself. *Fascistic” threats identified by Mailer often overlap with socio-political positions Mailer voiced. For example, in his August 1, 1996, Esquire article "In Search of Deliverance," Mailer expressed sympathy with the 1996 presidential campaign of proto-Trumpian" Pat Buchanan, despite recognizing that “Buchanan had anchored his right flank on pro-life.” (The strain of sexism tapped here has ample pre-1990s precedents, which are perhaps most dramatically on display in Mailer's responses in the 1971 "The Prisoner of Sex" to criticism from feminist Kate Millet and post-1990s echoed in his references to abortion as "murder" in the 2004 "Some Modest Proposels.") On anorher aspect of gender politics, in “Searching for Deliverance" Mailer ridicules Clinton’s 1993 “gays in the military” initiative stating that gay marriage would embitter “heterosexual marrieds.”
True, Mailers claimed that his interest in the Buchanan campaign was motivated by a hope that Buchanan’s criticisms of the large corporation and ideas for economically helping the working class suggested that he might come to join and revolutionize the Democrats toward his own -- to use a term favored by JM Lennon and JB Mailer to characterise Mailer pere's politics -- “Libertarian Socialism." Nevertheless, Mailer’s references to abortion as “murder” in his 2004 “Immodest Proposals” and elsewhere hardly suggests a solely “libertarian” conservative Mailer ---not, at least, on gender politics. Indeed, views expressed by Mailer on race also suggest an ideologically “social conservative” side of the personal!y unruly Mailer.
To the racial side of Mailer's social conservatism, in "Miami and the Siege of Chicago” Mailer writes that “he was horridly sick of listening to the tyranny of soul music, so bored with Negroes triumphantly late for appointments… so despairing of the smell of booze and pot and spent-up hope in the blood-shot eyes of negroes bombed at noon, so envious, finally, of the that ability to abdicate from the long year-end decade-drowning yoke of work and responsibility that he must have become, in some secret part of his flesh, a closet Republican.” Nearly three decades later in an interview with Christorpher Hitchens Mailer said, “Before there can be better black and white relations, the blacks have to come to a recognition that they are half responsible for everything that’s happened." Indeed, Douglas Taylor outrightly declared Mailer “a racist” in the “Race” chapter of the 2021 “Norman Mailer in Context" (a volume that also contains chapters on Mailer and race and #MeToo).
To be sure, Mailer's affinities with sexist and racist views were offset by coexisting contrary views – support for autonomous women as well as men, admiration for many Blacks (for example, James Baldwin, Mohammed Ali and MLK). Indeed, Mailer’s divided self surely enhanced the breadth, if not the cohesion, of his vision. True, the Mailer of such social conservative views need not be judged proto-Trumpian. Yet abortion and racism were certainly, along with anti-corporatism -- three cornerstones of both Buchanan's political brand and Mailer's socially conservative side - certainly were views crucial to the coalition that raised Trump to power and continues to sustain him. Indeed, the Mailer name would grace the tables of contents of the paleo-conservative, and currently pro-Trump, “The American Conservative,” which Buchanan co-founded. The reactionary inclinations of Mailer's divided self closely resemble some key features of the anti-democratic tendencies in American politics about which he forewarned.
Mailer’s reactionary inclinations come mixed in unusual tensions with the rather conventionally radical leanings of his Harvard, wartime and early post-WWII youth, which paralled the anti-hierarchical – anti-capitalist and Statists --Marxism of Trotskyists like Mailer friend Jean Malaquais and anarcho-syndicalists like George Orwell and John Dos Passos (Dos Passos, that is, preceding his full-fledged, Goldwater-consolidated libertarian turn. The reactionary inclinations developed gradually. To telegraph their devolution, following the decade-long loss of literary acclaim that had succeeded Mailer's sensationally successful "The Naked and the Dead," Mailer reacted to his lost celebrity very anxiously. He responded to his anxiety by straining after the security of hipster cool and traditional American tough-guy manliness, barroom and bedroom bravado and a colorful enactment of the prevailing White patriarchal culture."
Mailer’s prescience about threats to American democracy, should not be confused with a coherent or constructive politics. Although Mailer was an economic egalitarian and political democrat and shone with flashes of political insight and prescience, it would be rash to therefore infer that Mailer set a reliably wise political example. That said, "A Mysterious Country" dramatically reveals Mailer as an impressive dystopian Nostradamus. Some future interpreter/anthologist of the prescient Mailer and the power of his prophesies might focus on the pathos of the divided political self that voiced the prophesies. Some future profile of a more programmatic than prophetic political Mailer might be drawn from Mailer's numerous, if disparate, political statements --indeed is already largely available in Mailer's 2004 "Some Modest Proposals." Readers of "A Mysterious Country" who mainly come to it out of shock and confusion at the current fragility of our democracy will emerge from the collection discussed here finding the country more than a little less mysterious.
However, Mailer’s prophetic acuity regarding the fragility of U.S democracy, like much else, rested in part on Mailer’s affinities with the ostensible targets of his criticism. As Harold Bloom wrote in "Novelists and Novels," Mailer’s validity as a cultural critic is always qualified by his own immersion in what he censures." To wit, Mailer's views reveal a world inhabited to an unusual extent by Mailer himself. *Fascistic” threats identified by Mailer often overlap with socio-political positions Mailer voiced. For example, in his August 1, 1996, Esquire article "In Search of Deliverance," Mailer expressed sympathy with the 1996 presidential campaign of proto-Trumpian" Pat Buchanan, despite recognizing that “Buchanan had anchored his right flank on pro-life.” (The strain of sexism tapped here has ample pre-1990s precedents, which are perhaps most dramatically on display in Mailer's responses in the 1971 "The Prisoner of Sex" to criticism from feminist Kate Millet and post-1990s echoed in his references to abortion as "murder" in the 2004 "Some Modest Proposels.") On anorher aspect of gender politics, in “Searching for Deliverance" Mailer ridicules Clinton’s 1993 “gays in the military” initiative stating that gay marriage would embitter “heterosexual marrieds.”
True, Mailers claimed that his interest in the Buchanan campaign was motivated by a hope that Buchanan’s criticisms of the large corporation and ideas for economically helping the working class suggested that he might come to join and revolutionize the Democrats toward his own -- to use a term favored by JM Lennon and JB Mailer to characterise Mailer pere's politics -- “Libertarian Socialism." Nevertheless, Mailer’s references to abortion as “murder” in his 2004 “Immodest Proposals” and elsewhere hardly suggests a solely “libertarian” conservative Mailer ---not, at least, on gender politics. Indeed, views expressed by Mailer on race also suggest an ideologically “social conservative” side of the personal!y unruly Mailer.
To the racial side of Mailer's social conservatism, in "Miami and the Siege of Chicago” Mailer writes that “he was horridly sick of listening to the tyranny of soul music, so bored with Negroes triumphantly late for appointments… so despairing of the smell of booze and pot and spent-up hope in the blood-shot eyes of negroes bombed at noon, so envious, finally, of the that ability to abdicate from the long year-end decade-drowning yoke of work and responsibility that he must have become, in some secret part of his flesh, a closet Republican.” Nearly three decades later in an interview with Christorpher Hitchens Mailer said, “Before there can be better black and white relations, the blacks have to come to a recognition that they are half responsible for everything that’s happened." Indeed, Douglas Taylor outrightly declared Mailer “a racist” in the “Race” chapter of the 2021 “Norman Mailer in Context" (a volume that also contains chapters on Mailer and race and #MeToo).
To be sure, Mailer's affinities with sexist and racist views were offset by coexisting contrary views – support for autonomous women as well as men, admiration for many Blacks (for example, James Baldwin, Mohammed Ali and MLK). Indeed, Mailer’s divided self surely enhanced the breadth, if not the cohesion, of his vision. True, the Mailer of such social conservative views need not be judged proto-Trumpian. Yet abortion and racism were certainly, along with anti-corporatism -- three cornerstones of both Buchanan's political brand and Mailer's socially conservative side - certainly were views crucial to the coalition that raised Trump to power and continues to sustain him. Indeed, the Mailer name would grace the tables of contents of the paleo-conservative, and currently pro-Trump, “The American Conservative,” which Buchanan co-founded. The reactionary inclinations of Mailer's divided self closely resemble some key features of the anti-democratic tendencies in American politics about which he forewarned.
Mailer’s reactionary inclinations come mixed in unusual tensions with the rather conventionally radical leanings of his Harvard, wartime and early post-WWII youth, which paralled the anti-hierarchical – anti-capitalist and Statists --Marxism of Trotskyists like Mailer friend Jean Malaquais and anarcho-syndicalists like George Orwell and John Dos Passos (Dos Passos, that is, preceding his full-fledged, Goldwater-consolidated libertarian turn. The reactionary inclinations developed gradually. To telegraph their devolution, following the decade-long loss of literary acclaim that had succeeded Mailer's sensationally successful "The Naked and the Dead," Mailer reacted to his lost celebrity very anxiously. He responded to his anxiety by straining after the security of hipster cool and traditional American tough-guy manliness, barroom and bedroom bravado and a colorful enactment of the prevailing White patriarchal culture."
Mailer’s prescience about threats to American democracy, should not be confused with a coherent or constructive politics. Although Mailer was an economic egalitarian and political democrat and shone with flashes of political insight and prescience, it would be rash to therefore infer that Mailer set a reliably wise political example. That said, "A Mysterious Country" dramatically reveals Mailer as an impressive dystopian Nostradamus. Some future interpreter/anthologist of the prescient Mailer and the power of his prophesies might focus on the pathos of the divided political self that voiced the prophesies. Some future profile of a more programmatic than prophetic political Mailer might be drawn from Mailer's numerous, if disparate, political statements --indeed is already largely available in Mailer's 2004 "Some Modest Proposals." Readers of "A Mysterious Country" who mainly come to it out of shock and confusion at the current fragility of our democracy will emerge from the collection discussed here finding the country more than a little less mysterious.
April 13, 2023
Here's a review I wrote for the Arts Fuse:
Book Review: Advertisements for Democracy — Norman Mailer’s Anti-Fascist Eloquence
April 9, 2023|4 Comments
By Peter Keough
Guns, anti-Semitism, paranoid conspiracy theories — it never gets old.
A Mysterious Country: The Grace and Fragility of American Democracy by Norman Mailer, edited by J. Michael Lennon and John Buffalo Mailer. Arcade, 336 pages, $24.66 (hardcover).
Are we ready for the return of Norman Mailer, the centenary of whose birth was on January 31? Could the once preeminent American writer, filmmaker, activist, and pundit, who died in 2017 at 84, be about to enter his second (or perhaps third or fourth) act? Though his cultural impact and stature have waned over the years and his reputation as a misogynist has never fully recovered from the 1960 stabbing of his second wife, could this — to paraphrase the titles of his 1998 anthology and his infamous 1959 short story about the transformative powers of anal intercourse — be the time of Norman Mailer’s time?
So would argue his son John Buffalo Mailer and his biographer J. Michael Lennon in their collection of the late author’s pronouncements about his rocky love affair with the American system of government. And indeed this era of moronic MAGA rantings, of rampant hypocrisy, shameless mendacity, malignant racism, anti-Semitism, anti-intellectualism, and arrogant ignorance calls out for the kind of fiery vitriol and inspired diatribe that fills this volume. Beginning with a scene from his sensationally successful first novel The Naked and the Dead (1948), in which a general demonstrates fascism in practice by humiliating a subordinate, and culminating with a note from Herman Göring that Mailer unearthed while researching his last novel, The Castle in the Forest (2007), these texts examine the many ways the ideal of democracy has been subverted by the allure of totalitarianism.
But the best comes from the middle of the pack — the ’60s to ’70s when Mailer toned down his pompous philosophizing and focused on acerbic and sometimes hilarious observational political reporting leavened by genuinely stirring proclamations in an Old Testament prophetic mode. Even the titles of the books had an apocalyptic ring to them, such as The Armies of the Night (1968) — though its subtitle History as a Novel/The Novel as History demonstrates Mailer’s orotund inability to let well enough alone. A first-person account related in the third person (a stylistic crotchet Mailer would repeatedly draw on in subsequent works to sometimes annoying effect) of his participation in the 1967 anti-Vietnam War demonstration in Washington DC, the volume captures something timeless in the American character in this description of a US Marshal:
…he just hated the sheer Jew York presumption of that slovenly, drug-ridden weak contaminating America-hating army of termites … he was full of American rectitude…and savage, savage as the exhaust left in the wake of a motorcycle club…yeah, this Marshal loved action, but he was in that no man’s land between the old frontier and the new ranch home – as they, yes they—the enemies of the Marshal – tried to pass bills to limit the purchase of hunting rifles, so did they try to kill America…
Guns, anti-Semitism, paranoid conspiracy theories — it never gets old.
Unfortunately, these days we don’t have anyone of the caliber of a Mailer — or a Hunter S. Thompson, or a Gore Vidal — to counter the madness with ruthless mockery. The art of invective is just another American institution that Trump and the MAGA crowd have devalued, reducing it to repeated puerile taunts and name calling. But Mailer could be a master of it, as with his descriptions of Barry Goldwater at the 1964 Republican convention: “…he radiated…the skinny boyish sincerity of a fellow who wears glasses but is determined to have a good time…he had indeed the mind of a powerful freshman…” Almost endearing. More sinister, though, are his followers:
…the worst of these workers looked like divinity students who had been expelled from the seminary for embezzling class funds and still felt they were nearest to J.C. – there was a dark blank fanaticism in their eyes…And the best of the Goldwater professionals…[had] the lean flat look of the hunter, full of moral indignation and moral vacuity.
Most ominous, though, are the bagpipes:
…this was the true music of the Wasps. There was something wild and martial and bottomless in the passion, a pride which would not be exhausted…the Faustian rage of a white civilization…the cry of a race which was born to dominate and might never learn to share, and never learning, might be willing to end the game, the end of the world was in the sound of the pipes.
Nearly 60 years later, the pipes are still calling.
Devastatingly acute as he was as an observer and satirist, Mailer also aspired to punditry, with mixed results. For decades he warned that racial divisions would spark civil war and the rise of totalitarianism. The hostile energy aroused by the Cold War lost direction when the Soviet Union collapsed, he explained, and was turned inward — he compared it to iron filings that lose direction when the magnets are removed — and would break out into open conflict between the races. He even wrote a letter to Hillary Clinton in 1992 suggesting that Bill should “dedicate [and] consecrate the next four years to bringing whites and blacks…together.” When he perceived that, after being elected President, Clinton had dropped that plank and pushed instead a watered down agenda of minute progressive fixes, Mailer denounced him for his “boutique politics.”
But he himself balked at the specter of a Black uprising. In his account of the debacle of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968) he complained that “he was getting tired of Negro rights and Black Power — every black riot was … pushing him to the point where he might have to throw his vote in with the revolution – what a tedious perspective of prisons and law courts and worse.”
Oddly, for someone so dismayed by the prospect of totalitarianism, he promoted as a solution to that threat one of the key elements of fascism — a charismatic leader. Someone who, as he explains in his 1960 Esquire essay “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” could tap into “that concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the dream life of the nation…[A] hero central to his time, a man whose personality might suggest contradictions and mysteries which could reach into the alienated circuits of the underground, because only a hero can capture the secret imagination of a people.”
He saw John F. Kennedy, the subject of that essay, as filling that role. JFK was murdered. Then he anointed John’s brother Robert; he, too, was murdered. After that he found the pickings slim. Eugene McCarthy he saw as “the dean of the finest English department in the land,” but not as a President. Then he started getting flaky. Clint Eastwood? Warren Beatty? Patrick Buchanan?
Perhaps he was fortunate that he did not see that dream candidate turn into the nightmare of the Trump Presidency. But he also did not live long enough to see Barack Obama elected in 2008. Since Mailer was a supporter of Jesse Jackson’s candidacy in the ’80s, one wonders if that milestone might have delivered to him the “time of his time.”
Mailer had the clarity to foresee much of what was to come, and also to realize that the future was for the most part dark and unshaped and unknowable. “What a curiosity is our Democracy, what a mystery,” he wrote in The New Yorker in 1974 at the height of Watergate a few months before Nixon resigned. “No novelist unwinds a narrative that well.”
Peter Keough writes about film and other topics and has contributed to numerous publications. He had been the film editor of the Boston Phoenix from 1989 to its demise in 2013 and has edited three books on film, most recently For Kids of All Ages: The National Society of Film Critics on Children’s Movies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).
Book Review: Advertisements for Democracy — Norman Mailer’s Anti-Fascist Eloquence
April 9, 2023|4 Comments
By Peter Keough
Guns, anti-Semitism, paranoid conspiracy theories — it never gets old.
A Mysterious Country: The Grace and Fragility of American Democracy by Norman Mailer, edited by J. Michael Lennon and John Buffalo Mailer. Arcade, 336 pages, $24.66 (hardcover).
Are we ready for the return of Norman Mailer, the centenary of whose birth was on January 31? Could the once preeminent American writer, filmmaker, activist, and pundit, who died in 2017 at 84, be about to enter his second (or perhaps third or fourth) act? Though his cultural impact and stature have waned over the years and his reputation as a misogynist has never fully recovered from the 1960 stabbing of his second wife, could this — to paraphrase the titles of his 1998 anthology and his infamous 1959 short story about the transformative powers of anal intercourse — be the time of Norman Mailer’s time?
So would argue his son John Buffalo Mailer and his biographer J. Michael Lennon in their collection of the late author’s pronouncements about his rocky love affair with the American system of government. And indeed this era of moronic MAGA rantings, of rampant hypocrisy, shameless mendacity, malignant racism, anti-Semitism, anti-intellectualism, and arrogant ignorance calls out for the kind of fiery vitriol and inspired diatribe that fills this volume. Beginning with a scene from his sensationally successful first novel The Naked and the Dead (1948), in which a general demonstrates fascism in practice by humiliating a subordinate, and culminating with a note from Herman Göring that Mailer unearthed while researching his last novel, The Castle in the Forest (2007), these texts examine the many ways the ideal of democracy has been subverted by the allure of totalitarianism.
But the best comes from the middle of the pack — the ’60s to ’70s when Mailer toned down his pompous philosophizing and focused on acerbic and sometimes hilarious observational political reporting leavened by genuinely stirring proclamations in an Old Testament prophetic mode. Even the titles of the books had an apocalyptic ring to them, such as The Armies of the Night (1968) — though its subtitle History as a Novel/The Novel as History demonstrates Mailer’s orotund inability to let well enough alone. A first-person account related in the third person (a stylistic crotchet Mailer would repeatedly draw on in subsequent works to sometimes annoying effect) of his participation in the 1967 anti-Vietnam War demonstration in Washington DC, the volume captures something timeless in the American character in this description of a US Marshal:
…he just hated the sheer Jew York presumption of that slovenly, drug-ridden weak contaminating America-hating army of termites … he was full of American rectitude…and savage, savage as the exhaust left in the wake of a motorcycle club…yeah, this Marshal loved action, but he was in that no man’s land between the old frontier and the new ranch home – as they, yes they—the enemies of the Marshal – tried to pass bills to limit the purchase of hunting rifles, so did they try to kill America…
Guns, anti-Semitism, paranoid conspiracy theories — it never gets old.
Unfortunately, these days we don’t have anyone of the caliber of a Mailer — or a Hunter S. Thompson, or a Gore Vidal — to counter the madness with ruthless mockery. The art of invective is just another American institution that Trump and the MAGA crowd have devalued, reducing it to repeated puerile taunts and name calling. But Mailer could be a master of it, as with his descriptions of Barry Goldwater at the 1964 Republican convention: “…he radiated…the skinny boyish sincerity of a fellow who wears glasses but is determined to have a good time…he had indeed the mind of a powerful freshman…” Almost endearing. More sinister, though, are his followers:
…the worst of these workers looked like divinity students who had been expelled from the seminary for embezzling class funds and still felt they were nearest to J.C. – there was a dark blank fanaticism in their eyes…And the best of the Goldwater professionals…[had] the lean flat look of the hunter, full of moral indignation and moral vacuity.
Most ominous, though, are the bagpipes:
…this was the true music of the Wasps. There was something wild and martial and bottomless in the passion, a pride which would not be exhausted…the Faustian rage of a white civilization…the cry of a race which was born to dominate and might never learn to share, and never learning, might be willing to end the game, the end of the world was in the sound of the pipes.
Nearly 60 years later, the pipes are still calling.
Devastatingly acute as he was as an observer and satirist, Mailer also aspired to punditry, with mixed results. For decades he warned that racial divisions would spark civil war and the rise of totalitarianism. The hostile energy aroused by the Cold War lost direction when the Soviet Union collapsed, he explained, and was turned inward — he compared it to iron filings that lose direction when the magnets are removed — and would break out into open conflict between the races. He even wrote a letter to Hillary Clinton in 1992 suggesting that Bill should “dedicate [and] consecrate the next four years to bringing whites and blacks…together.” When he perceived that, after being elected President, Clinton had dropped that plank and pushed instead a watered down agenda of minute progressive fixes, Mailer denounced him for his “boutique politics.”
But he himself balked at the specter of a Black uprising. In his account of the debacle of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968) he complained that “he was getting tired of Negro rights and Black Power — every black riot was … pushing him to the point where he might have to throw his vote in with the revolution – what a tedious perspective of prisons and law courts and worse.”
Oddly, for someone so dismayed by the prospect of totalitarianism, he promoted as a solution to that threat one of the key elements of fascism — a charismatic leader. Someone who, as he explains in his 1960 Esquire essay “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” could tap into “that concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the dream life of the nation…[A] hero central to his time, a man whose personality might suggest contradictions and mysteries which could reach into the alienated circuits of the underground, because only a hero can capture the secret imagination of a people.”
He saw John F. Kennedy, the subject of that essay, as filling that role. JFK was murdered. Then he anointed John’s brother Robert; he, too, was murdered. After that he found the pickings slim. Eugene McCarthy he saw as “the dean of the finest English department in the land,” but not as a President. Then he started getting flaky. Clint Eastwood? Warren Beatty? Patrick Buchanan?
Perhaps he was fortunate that he did not see that dream candidate turn into the nightmare of the Trump Presidency. But he also did not live long enough to see Barack Obama elected in 2008. Since Mailer was a supporter of Jesse Jackson’s candidacy in the ’80s, one wonders if that milestone might have delivered to him the “time of his time.”
Mailer had the clarity to foresee much of what was to come, and also to realize that the future was for the most part dark and unshaped and unknowable. “What a curiosity is our Democracy, what a mystery,” he wrote in The New Yorker in 1974 at the height of Watergate a few months before Nixon resigned. “No novelist unwinds a narrative that well.”
Peter Keough writes about film and other topics and has contributed to numerous publications. He had been the film editor of the Boston Phoenix from 1989 to its demise in 2013 and has edited three books on film, most recently For Kids of All Ages: The National Society of Film Critics on Children’s Movies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).
April 7, 2023
Mailer's insights into America's ills are as relevant today as they were when these essays and excerpts were written. Often funny, sometimes provocative, always thoughtful, Mailer's is a voice that we'd be foolish to discard to the dustbin of history.
April 23, 2023
Well-written, but it’s funny how nearly all of Mailer’s predictions and insights are wrong. Imagine that!
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews