Norman Mailer: The Last Romantic by Carl Rollyson

Author:Carl Rollyson [Rollyson, Carl]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: uploadable
Publisher: The Odyssey Press
Published: 2017-04-18T00:00:00+00:00

IX. King of the Hill (1968-1972)

1. Miami and the Siege of Chicago

Harvard, June 1968. “I knew the Norman Mailer I had roomed with. And then there was a very different Norman Mailer who became the writer and a still different Norman Mailer who was a sixties radical, a hard drinker, delivering rebellious speeches. Meeting him there at the twenty-fifth reunion,” Richard Weinberg recalled, was still another Norman Mailer: “He was very gentlemanly, different from the public Norman Mailer,” and somehow settled. “He and Beverly seemed very devoted to each other.” Were they on their best behavior? Mailer felt “fucked over” when he heard that some of his classmates dreaded he would do something to embarrass them in front of their children.

He had described himself in Advertisements as a “quick change artist,” a man of many guises. As a result, people were always responding to his last appearance. He was no longer the cocky yet circumspect young author of The Naked and the Dead, the “psychic outlaw” of “The White Negro,” or the wise fool of The Armies of the Night — to mention just a few of his roles. While he would continue to use the development of his persona as the focus of his work in the next five years, Armies already gave evidence that he was becoming tired of himself as a public spectacle and that he was coming to terms with his middle aged self. As he would write shortly to James Dickey:

“I’ve seen so much of myself in Maidstone that the thought of more of my personality offered to the public holds no great pleasure for me.”

Certainly Mailer’s coverage of the political conventions in Miami and the Siege of Chicago is subdued in comparison to his flamboyance in The Armies of the Night. He refers to himself as “the reporter,” and he shies away from the public role he had sought in the march on the Pentagon. His evocation of the steamy, jungle-swamp atmosphere of Miami that is dredged and paved over with modern machinery and alleviated with air conditioning is as provocative as his brilliant dissection of Los Angeles in “Superman Comes to the Supermarket.” What Americans do to their places, the sense of a sub-reality that only Mailer knows how to bring to the surface, gives Miami and the Siege of Chicago the same weight as his other important reportage.

Many readers, however, have been surprised and even dismayed at Mailer’s sympathy for Richard Nixon, who comes to dominate Miami as Kennedy dominated Los Angeles. While Nixon is not portrayed as a charismatic figure, he earns Mailer’s respect for having triumphed over his defeats in 1960 and 1962. Mailer himself is surprised. He has never liked Nixon — in fact he despised him for the Checkers speech and thought of him as not much more than a cheap, manipulative politician. Now, however, Nixon is a survivor. He exudes a competence and confidence and an awareness of how to employ the levers of political power that impress Mailer.

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