The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution (29 page)

Herr experienced a “complete paralysis of fear”; he felt like the blocked writer in Stephen King’s
The Shining
, just writing the same sentence over and over again, filling up endless pages with unusable material. He had the meat of the narrative in hand—the
Esquire
stories—but no notion of where to start the book and how to resolve it satisfactorily.

Herr went into psychoanalysis and struggled for six years before the words finally came. “I had trouble adjusting to the seventies,” he told Tom Morgan, who profiled Herr in 1984 for
Esquire
. “We got fucked up in Vietnam. Lost some dear friends. We didn’t get away all that clean.” In an unpublished passage from Herr’s 1976
Esquire
story “High on War,” the writer seemed to be working through his lingering feelings about the war:

Herr didn’t publish his Vietnam book until 1977, but the long delay didn’t mitigate its impact.
Dispatches
was recognized as a classic of war literature, one of the few nonfiction Vietnam books that rose to the level of great fiction. “Quite simply,” the
New York Times
critic C. D. B. Bryan wrote, “
Dispatches
is the best book to have been written about the Vietnam War…. Herr’s literary style derives from the era of acid rock, the Beatles’ films, of that druggy, Hunter Thompson once-removed-from-reality appreciation of The Great Cosmic Joke.”

Dispatches
was nominated for the 1978 National Book Award, and it has never gone out of print. The book’s echoes reverberated in all of the great films made about the war, from the surreal mindscape of
Apocalypse Now
(for which Herr wrote the voiceover narration) to the unrepentant brutality of Oliver Stone’s
Platoon
. Herr couldn’t get away from Vietnam. Even when he moved to London in 1980 “because I didn’t want to become some kind of horrible media personage,” he continued to receive letters from vets and countless offers from magazine editors to cover some war or another. He turned them all down. “Any more wars? Never again, man,” Herr told Tom Morgan. “Shit, man, every time there’s a shot fired around the world, I get a call from some magazine to go. I don’t want to see it ever again. I don’t want to, man.”

HISTORY AS A NOVEL,
THE NOVEL AS HISTORY

I
n late May 1964, a time when the majority of Americans still supported the war in Vietnam, there appeared in the
New York Herald Tribune
an ad signed by 149 draft-age men stating that they wouldn’t fight in Southeast Asia if called to do so. The ad attracted little attention; it was just a benign little cherry bomb, nothing more. The country’s antiwar dissent had yet to coalesce into a critical mass.

The earliest antiwar protests, such as the teach-ins at the University of Michigan, Kent State, and Berkeley, were relatively modest in size and received only perfunctory news coverage. On July 3, 1964, the day that President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law, a group of protesters led by activist David Dellinger and folk singer Joan Baez gathered at Lafayette Park to protest Vietnam. As a symbolic act of disobedience, the group then kneeled en masse in front of the White House, and found to their surprise that no one cared. The police made no effort to arrest anyone.

The early antiwar protests were fairly genteel affairs, orchestrated by earnest conscientious objectors, civil rights organizers, and nuclear disarmament activists whose combined ire was not enough to evoke more than a collective shrug by the large majority of Americans who still supported the war effort. Not every peacenik was a protester, either; it was one thing to voice one’s concerns privately, quite another to carry a placard.

When President Johnson ramped up draft calls from 17,000 a month
to 35,000 a month in July 1965, it triggered a wave of domestic protest that pulled in a large coalition of disparate groups, from students and businessmen to housewives and Social Security card carriers. Public figures were also starting to contribute their voices to the dissent. In 1967 the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation sponsored the International War Crimes Tribunal, a plenipotentiary forum whose board members included novelist James Baldwin and existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Using extensive testimony from Vietnamese citizens, journalists, medical experts, and military leaders, the tribunal sought to reprimand the United States for its illegal use of chemical weaponry, particularly napalm, against the North Vietnamese, comparing it to the war atrocities committed by the Nazis during World War II.

The tribunal was great theater, a display of rhetorical fireworks and moving testimony. At one point Sartre branded tribunal no-show Secretary of State Dean Rusk a “mediocre functionary” and wondered how Rusk, “armed with the miserable arguments with which he amuses the press,” would fare in a face-to-face debate with Bertrand Russell.

But the tribunal was being held in Stockholm, and its indignant cry was faint and indistinct in the United States, a series of small stories buried in newspapers. A few enterprising activists would bring the debate to the foreground in short order, however. Weaned on the civil rights battles of the early sixties, they were now transferring their energies to domestic resistance against the war, using their flair for street theater and human mobilization in ways that the first-wave protesters could not fathom.

Jerry Rubin, a former journalist and aspiring socialist who had participated in the earliest Free Speech Movement marches that had coalesced around the University of California campus in Berkeley, was the shrewdest agent provocateur of the antiwar effort. A founding member of the Youth International Movement along with Brandeis University grad and civil rights veteran Abbie Hoffman, Rubin in early 1965 was organizing two days of demonstrations to take place on the Berkeley campus, a call to action that would land Cal at the forefront of student-driven social activism in America. The idea was to bring the world’s leading intellectuals to Berkeley, including Bertrand Russell and muckraking journalist I. F. Stone, to speak out against the war and thus generate big media coverage. The first name on Rubin’s list of speakers was Norman Mailer.

Rubin’s fellow members on the Vietnam Day Committee, particularly
the New Left contingent, vehemently objected. For one thing, Mailer was too controversial, a poor role model for passive resistance. On November 19, 1960, in the waning hours of a party held in his Brooklyn Heights apartment, Mailer had stabbed his second wife, Adele, in the sternum and the back with a penknife, and was sent to Bellevue Hospital for seventeen days of psychiatric observation. That act of violence didn’t sit well with the organizers, nor did Mailer’s penchant for drunken fisticuffs and other petty demonstrations of hairy-chested machismo. A writer who craved attention and respect, Mailer tended to suck all the air out of a room. Not, in other words, a man of the people.

But Rubin knew better than to reduce Mailer to the sum of his scandals. He had been a fan of Mailer’s journalism, which in Rubin’s view had been the era’s most probing social criticism written expressly for a mainstream audience. In Rubin’s view, “Superman Comes to the Super-mart,” Mailer’s
Esquire
dispatch from the 1960 Democratic convention, had nailed the dialectic between the Kennedy voters who wanted to see America return to its best version of itself—its crackling dynamism and hunger for social progress made flesh in their young candidate—and the dreary Nixonians who settled for flabby middle-class pieties. Rubin sensed that, given the proper forum, Mailer could articulate the rage and fear of the antiwar constituency with the same rhetorical brilliance he had displayed in that seminal
Esquire
piece.

Mailer himself wasn’t so sure. He was, he once wrote when he was forty-four years old, an “embattled aging enfant terrible of the literary world, wise father of six children, radical intellectual, existential philosopher, hard-working author, champion of obscenity, husband of four battling wives, admirable bar drinker, and much exaggerated street fighter, party giver, hostess insulter.” Mailer was a generation removed from the young firebrands of the New Left, whose radicalism had been forged in civil rights organizations like Tom Hayden’s Students for a Democratic Society. Mailer was a World War II veteran who had seen action in the Pacific theater and had written what many still considered the definitive novel of the “good war,”
The Naked and the Dead
. But that book was nearly two decades old, and since then, Mailer’s literary reputation had waxed and waned.

The Deer Park
, his 1955 novel about spiritual rot in Hollywood for which he had struggled to find a publisher, received some of the most
vituperatively negative reviews of Mailer’s career. He was perhaps the most famous writer in America but, in the VDC’s view, for all the wrong reasons. “Mailer has grown a great deal in power of language since he wrote
The Naked and the Dead
,” wrote
Saturday Review
critic Granville Hicks in 1967. “Why, then, has he been writing trivia and tripe for the past ten years or more?”

“There had been all too many years when he had the reputation of being a loser,” Mailer would self-reflexively write. “It had cost him too much. While he could hardly, at this stage of his career, look back on a succession of well-timed and generally established triumphs, his consolation in those hours when he was most uncharitable to himself is that taken at his very worst he was at least still worthy of being a character in a novel by Balzac, win one day, lose the next, and do it with boom!”

Rubin knew better. Mailer had been an early champion of the Beats, a major theorist of “hip” culture with his essay “The White Negro.” Mailer agreed in principle with the impulses and objectives of the antiwar movement, but he had never been a joiner, not to the extent that he could commit himself to activism in earnest. Deep in his bones, he still thought of himself as a literary establishment figure, an Edwardian of sorts who kept himself at an Olympian remove from organized social movements. Even when he was dabbling with Marxism with his friend Jean Malaquois in the forties, its appeal was largely that of an intellectual construct, a mode of thought to toss around for a while. Karl Marx’s
Das Kapital
, he felt, “helps you to think better, but I never thought Marx was right, as far as Communism would solve all our problems.”

When Rubin called him, Mailer demurred; he had never addressed a large crowd before—Rubin estimated that as many as twenty thousand demonstrators might turn out. Mailer’s chosen forum was not oratory but the written word. And would the young crowd respond to him in any meaningful way or just dismiss him as an old-guard anachronism? Mailer told Rubin he would think about it.

A week later, he called Rubin back with an offer to present a speech on LBJ; it would be an opportunity to air some grievances against the president that Mailer had been pondering for a while. Some members of the Vietnam Day Committee wanted to screen the speech, but Rubin wouldn’t have it; it was absurd to think that Mailer would agree to that kind of scrutiny. The idea, Rubin argued, was to provide a forum for the
march’s participants to offer any viewpoint they so chose. Rubin threatened to quit the VDC unless Mailer was given free rein, and eventually the VDC relented.

Accompanied by novelist Don Carpenter and poet Michael McClure, Mailer encountered bedlam at every turn at Berkeley—protesters packed shoulder to shoulder on the steps of Sproul Hall, hanging over the balconies and rooftops of the surrounding buildings, chanting pro-NVA slogans and brash incitements to stop the madness. Paul Krassner, the editor and publisher of the underground paper
The Realist
, who was emceeing the event, introduced Mailer to thunderous applause. Mailer, dressed in a three-piece suit, addressed the crowd:

Rubin claimed it was the first time that any major public figure had actually made fun of the president, reduced him to a grotesquerie—the emperor as unholy fool (Krassner published the speech in
The Realist)
. Don Carpenter chalked it up to Mailer’s uncanny prescience: “He knew that by telling everyone to turn LBJ’s picture upside down he was going to make political history.” So successful was Mailer’s speech that after he walked away from the podium, Dick Gregory, the comedian turned activist who was the next scheduled speaker, turned to Carpenter, and said, “I ain’t gonna follow that shit.”