Army of One

"Armies" is written in the third person. Most of the action is observed and narrated, not by the conventional first-person "I," but by a central character known variously as "the Protagonist," "the Novelist," "the Historian," "Norman Mailer" or simply "Mailer" -- as in: "Mailer walked to the stage. He did not have any idea any longer of what he would say."

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Mailer's employment of what might be called "the third person personal," Lennon said, allowed him "to both use and transcend himself." He could be, simultaneously, both observer and observed.

Today, the move seems entirely Maileresque. Mailer's penchant for thrusting himself to the forefront, both in public and in his writing, has dominated his image for so long that we forget that this "Norman Mailer" was a self-invention. But consider what he said in 1948 -- in an interview unearthed by Lennon -- shortly after "The Naked and the Dead" made the 25-year-old first-novelist a literary star.

"It's much better when people who read your books don't know anything about you," Mailer the modest asserted back then. "I have refused to let Life magazine photograph me."

What happened to that Mailer?

Another panelist, English professor Morris Dickstein of City University of New York, explained.

The 1950s, Dickstein said, were "a period of personal problems and career reversals" for Mailer. His second and third novels "had largely failed," and fiction was "beginning to look like a dead end for him. He edged into journalism, but the results were uneven."

Then came "Advertisements for Myself," in which what Dickstein called "a strange and surprising alchemy" turned Mailer's collected journalism into a kind of greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts self-portrait. He learned that "by filtering the world through his own ego" he could reinvent himself, "turning straw into gold." And he went on, in "Armies," to use his "grandiose yet mocking improvisations -- his lighthearted self-importance, buoyed by an authentic moral seriousness . . . to cut a very large swath through the entire spirit of the age."

Mailer would write many more books, including "The Executioner's Song," his epic retelling of the life and execution of Gary Gilmore. Joan Didion called that one "ambitious to the point of vertigo," and it is widely viewed as his masterpiece. But while it, too, was a fascinating mix of genres -- either novelistic nonfiction or fiction following closely on reality -- "The Executioner's Song" was otherwise an entirely different book, because its author kept himself far in the background.

He would never again reveal himself quite as he did in "The Armies of the Night," a book that might have been called "Norman Mailer Marches on the Pentagon and Examines His Soul."

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