The great American misogynists

Reading Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night, it occurs to me that I haven’t read the great American misogynists. So far. An omission I shall endeavour to remedy.

Yes, I’m leaning towards feminist ideals, but these were different times. These were times when American male intellectuals were misogynists, tinted with homophobia if needs be. For Mailer as for even my literary hero Jack Kerouac, a following of interchangeable groupies was indissociable from the status of hero of the mind, along with copious amounts of liquor and whatever drugs one could get one’s hands on. Men did the thinking and the hard playing, and complacent flower girls did the pleasuring. This was, after all, free love.

Does the passing of time excuse everything? Or course not. What excuses (nearly) everything is genius. If you’re going to be outrageous, then for God’s sake do it with confidence, humour, and above all, style. And Norman Mailer had plenty of it all. Humour to make me laugh out loud in bed on my own. Style to make me earmark my poor battered second-hand paperback copy of The Armies of the Night beyond recognition.

I have thought about points of view in the novel, and experimented with them. As far as I could see there were two main ones, each with their pros and cons. The 3rd person ominiscient was for phallocentric Victorian novels, and the 1st person internal monologue was for post-Joycean feminine writing. Fine. But what was The Armies of the Night? During the first few pages, uncomprehending, I had to keep switching over and back to the front cover, to make sure that it was the same Norman Mailer, the writer of the book, who had written an autobiographical account of an anecdote in the life of Norman Mailer. The dichotomy first/third person has never stopped people from writing thinly veiled auto-fiction, but that style necessitates at the very least a change of name. But no, there it was. Norman Mailer inside. Normal Mailer outside.

The device is simple and brilliant, but I had never encountered it before. The book's subtitle: "History as a Novel. The Novel as History" illustrates its Janus-like form. It allows one to be truthful, more truthful than with autobiography, because one can be both self-deprecating and self-agrandising at the same time without sounding pompous [See Doris Lessing quote]. And Mailer is totally and utterly truthful, every scratch, itch, cowardice, hesitation, compromise, alcohol-fuelled antics, subsequent embarrassment and pounding headache, is explored and laid out in delightfully obscene exhibitionist detail. And what gorgeous detail! If God is in the details, it certainly feels like some higher power was propelling Mailer on this Ulyssean feat of hilarious minute-by-minute recording of the events of these few days of anti-Vietnam war protest. It’s true, and it’s so human. We have all groped in the dark, drunk, for a light switch and ended up pissing outside the toilet bowl. Have you not? Ok so, it’s just me and Normal Mailer.

So what happens in The Armies of the Night? The book opens with a Mailer-bashing newspaper article from the Time, and proceeds to trace back the action as experienced from the eyes of our anti-hero Norman Mailer. It starts with an early morning phone call. “It was taken for granted that nothing respectable would come out of the day if the morning began on the phone, and indeed for periods when he was writing he looked on transactions via telephone as Arabs look upon pigs.”

The action proceeds, broken up by incongruous newspaper-type headings delimiting arbitrary sections, akin to Ulysses’s parody of journalism in the Aeolus chapter set in a newspaper office. The story can be summarised by borrowing again a random quote from this eminently quotable book: “The March on the Pentagon was an ambiguous event whose essential value of absurdity may not be established for ten or twenty years, or indeed ever.”

I won’t go on about what exactly happens in the book, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that it’s great writing and a great story and you should get your hands on it. If I may borrow again a quote on writing to conclude: “Just as professional football players love sex because it is so close to football, so he was fond of speaking in public because it was thus near to writing.”

Photo by Lonan