Army of One

"From the outset, let us bring you news of your protagonist," it begins. A reporter from Time has written up Mailer's Ambassador Theater debacle and his later arrest. The Novelist quotes the unflattering portrait in full, then launches his own version of the tale.

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In it, of course, we meet Mailer the egotist -- but he's an egotist who can laugh at himself. "Not for nothing," he writes, "had an eminent critic once said that Mailer was as fond of his style as an Italian tenor is fond of his vocal cords." He's also an egotist who understands that his egotism sprang from an ambition to move beyond a hated childhood self: "a modest boy, a modest young man . . . the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn."

We meet macho Mailer, the quick-to-anger pugilist always poised to duke it out with anyone (an overanxious protester, an American Nazi) who annoys or threatens him.

We meet insecure Mailer, who sees himself going mano a mano , figuratively speaking, with the patrician Lowell. The poet, oddly enough, seems not to find it quite as necessary to compete with Mailer as Mailer finds it to compete with him.

We meet that well-known character, sexist Mailer, though he makes only a passing reference to his worst sin against women: the time in 1960 when he stabbed his second wife at a drunken party and wound up committed to a prison hospital for a mere 17 days. (His wife declined to press charges.)

At the conference, feminist essayist Katha Pollitt didn't mention the stabbing. She didn't have to: Few have forgotten this dark side of Mailer's legend. But Pollitt did point out, among other things, the passage in "Armies" in which Mailer casually mentions that for years he never noticed that a nice woman he knew only as "Dinny," the wife of a writer friend, was in fact the well-known poet Denise Levertov.

But Pollitt also said that "what's so great about literature is that you don't have to fight the writer. You can take what's useful and what's inspiring." And what inspired her about "Armies" was "the freedom Norman Mailer gave himself."

"He gave himself the freedom to be ridiculous," she continued. "He gave himself the freedom to be egocentric, to put himself at the center of a story that he is only very peripheral at, and to make a joke out of that."

He also gave himself the freedom to be serious about the fate of America.

Mailer saw his country -- for which he sometimes felt "a sharp searing love" -- as threatened not just by the Vietnam War but by the broader dominion of what he called "corporation land," by "the subtle oppression which had come to America out of the very air" of the 20th century, with "its oppressive Faustian lusts, its technological excrement all over the conduits of nature, its entrapment of the innocence of the best . . . ."

This, in the end, is why he chose the technique he did. "Once History inhabits a crazy house," he informs readers who might be puzzled by the choice, "egotism may be the last tool left to History."

There's more. Much more.

But as Dick Fontaine said: To see Norman Mailer clearly, you have to read "Armies" for yourself.

One last Mailerism, then, to bid our Protagonist farewell.

Just after Mailer's Pentagon arrest, a reporter darted up to him in search of a quote. When such quote-hunting is artfully done, Mailer explained as he re-created the scene, the journalist makes his subject feel "sufficiently important to believe his immortal initials are being carved on a buttock of history."

There's no need for help from journalists here. With "The Armies of the Night," Norman Mailer carved a giant "N.M." on history's buttock all by himself -- and on literature's as well.