Novelist defined truth

Thursday, Nov. 15, 2007 | 6:52 a.m.

A few months before I became a reporter, I read some of Norman Mailer's political journalism collected in "Some Honorable Men," and to this day I thank the fates that put the book in my line of vision in some Chicago bookstore. From Mailer, who died last week at 84, I learned that to be a tabula rasa, to be a stenographer, would be to pollute the public mind by giving it over to the charlatans.

It's quite ironic, actually. Mailer hated journalists and the conventional practice of reporting.

In the preface to "Some Honorable Men," he writes this rather trenchant critique of the journalist:

"He is forbidden by a hundred censors, most of them inside himself, to communicate notions which are not conformistically simple, simple like plastic is simple, that is to say, monotonous."

And so Mailer approached his journalism, including his trips to the political conventions from 1960 to 1972, like a novelist. Not that he made up facts. I don't believe he did, and he repeatedly insisted he took greater care with accuracy of events than the rest of the press corps. Rather, if the witless, Cartesian reporter believes the best way to measure history is as a "faceless, even mindless recorder," then Mailer, as a novelist, approached the task with Einstein in mind. "There the velocity of the observer is as crucial to the measurement as any object observed."

(This insight was also a dangerous temptation for Mailer, as in his description of the 1967 march on the Pentagon, "Armies of the Night," which, despite moments of greatness, devolves into an orgy of solipsism, and is a truly terrible book, its baffling National Book Award notwithstanding.)

In Mailer's journalism we get something more than fact, which should never be confused with truth. Instead, we get insight in prose styles of immense range. In this passage about the 1968 Democratic National Convention, for instance, he playfully betters the beat poets and novelists to whom he obviously pays homage:

"In the oceanic stew of non-violent, tribal ball on drugs, nipples, arms, phalluses, mouths, wombs, armpits, short-hairs, navels, breasts and cheeks, incense of odor, flower and funk went humping into Breakthrough Freak-out Road together and children on acid saw Valhalla, Nepenthe and the Taj Mahal. Some went out forever, some went screaming down the alleys of the mad where cockroaches drive like Volkswagens on the oilcloth of the moon, gluttons found vertigo in centrifuges of consciousness, vomitoriums of ingestion, others found love, manifest of love in light, in shards of Nirvana, sparks of satori - they came back to the world a Twentieth Century Tribe wearing celebration bells and filthy garments. Used up livers gave their complexions a sickly pale, and hair grew on their faces like weeds. Yet they had seen some incontestable vision of the good - the universe was not absurd to them; like pilgrims they looked at society with the eyes of children: society was absurd. Every emperor who went down the path was naked, and they handed flowers to policemen."

What these flower children failed to understand was the contradiction, the schizophrenia, Mailer calls it, at the root of American life. Nor did they get that Americans would, in their "secret velvet of the heart," reject them, angrily.

Here he sees, like no one else, the civilized atavism, the raging contradiction at the heart of America:

"We call it hypocrisy but it is schizophrenia, a modest ranch-house life with Draconian military adventures; a land of equal opportunity where a white culture sits upon a Black; a horizontal community of Christian love and a vertical hierarchy of churches - the cross was well designed! A land of family, a land of illicit heat; a politics of principle, a politics of property; a nation of mental hygiene with movies and TV reminiscent of a mental pigpen; patriots with a detestation of obscenity who pollute their rivers; citizens with a detestation of government control who cannot bear any situation not controlled. The list must be endless ... Boys could go patiently to church at home and wait their turn to burn villages in Vietnam."

From these insights, it's easy to see why readers could much better understand the events of 1968, and the backlash that continues to the present, from Mailer than from his colleagues scribbling notes from speeches. The tectonic plates were moving, violently dancing actually, and it took a novelist, one obsessed not with bald facts, but with the nature of things, to see it.

From Mailer I cleaved to this lesson - we have a responsibility to seek the true nature of things, to seek in events and physical objects and people their core meaning, or just as often, meaninglessness.

To my own idiosyncratic taste, one of my favorite journalistic achievements of Mailer - and I say this because we live in a city often oblivious to what we're building around ourselves - was observing and writing about how the physical environment we create is the deepest reflection of our inner selves.

So here he is describing Miami Beach while at the 1972 Republican National Convention:

"For ten miles, from the Diplomat to the Di Lido, above Hallandale Beach Boulevard down to the Lincoln Mall, all the white refrigerators stood, piles of white refrigerators six and eight and twelve stories high, twenty stories high, shaped like sugar cubes and ice cube trays on edge, like mosques and palaces, shaped like matched white luggage and portable radios, stereos plastic compacts and plastic rings, Moorish castles shaped like waffle irons, shaped like the baffle plates on white plastic electric heaters, and cylinders like Waring blenders, buildings looking like giant op art and pop art paintings and sweet wedding cakes, cottons of kitsch and piles of dirty cotton stucco, yes, for ten miles the hotels for the delegates stood on the beach side of Collins Avenue: the Eden Roc and the Fontainebleau, the De Lido and the De Lano ... "

This census of tacky hotels continues on for a quarter of a page, like Homer's catalogue of the ships, until this:

"All the rivers of the very worst taste twisted down to the delta of each lobby in each grand Miami Beach hotel ...There was every color of iridescence, rainbows of vulgarity, aureoles of gorgeous taste, opium den of a middle class dollar, materialist as meat, sweat and the cigar ... It was the first of a hundred curiosities - that in a year when the Republican hovered on the edge of revolution, nihilism and lines of police on file to the horizon, visions of future Vietnams in our own cities upon us, the party of conservatism and principle of corporate wealth and personal frugality, the party of cleanliness, hygiene and balanced budget, should have set itself down on a sultan's strip."

In the adolescent decadence of the architecture of Miami Beach, Mailer could again see the contradiction, the schizophrenia.

There were moments, on airplanes, on trains and buses, at picnic tables and in deep sofas, when I would read a passage like the ones above and have to put down Mailer and close my eyes, crestfallen in recognition that I'd never write anything that good or see the world with such clear insight, but also relieved that I had Mailer in my hands and the eyes to see the words and the ears to hear the music.

Mailer is gone now, but let's hope that like the devil he so often invoked, he'll continue to whisper in our ears.