The Writer and the World (54 page)

Two hours later, at his Wall Street rally, standing below the statue of Washington on the steps of the Old Treasury Building, he was a different man. Hands now in trouser-pockets below the buttoned jacket, now in jacket pockets, he appeared to strut, like a boxer in the new respectability of a suit, confident of his public spread out in rows on the wide steps, filling the famous narrow street below. The sound system was bad. All the
words were lost, including Breslin’s threat about the shotguns on Park Avenue. But the scene was dramatically right.

A stranger coming on Wall Street at that moment with a knowledge of America gained only from films would have found in the scene a familiar glamour. He would have seen the man up there as every type of American myth-figure: boxer, sheriff, bad man, mobster, even politician. It was the setting: the famous street in the famous city, the buildings, the flags, the rhetoric and history in the Washington statue. And it was also Mailer: his sense of the city, perhaps, his sense of occasion.

But when I talked to Mailer a week after the election I found that his own memories of the Wall Street rally were vague; the details of the campaign, of particular scenes and particular words, had blurred.

“You don’t operate as a writer. You don’t see what people are wearing. You are aware of people only as eyes, a type of response. It’s more like being an actor.”

T
HE DAY AFTER
the Wall Street rally, after many more meetings, speeches, ceremonies, questions and answers and statements, Mailer said, “I’ve become duller. Steady, serious, duller. I’ve become a politician.”

He was in shirtsleeves in headquarters. The grimy windows were pushed open; the afternoon was thundery. He had just given a twenty-minute “in depth” TV interview; and it was part of the wastefulness of campaigning: that excellent interview, and the events of the week, would make about five minutes on the network’s Saturday news.

He had discovered, he said, that politics was hard work. Sleep was the thing he dreamt about and he understood now how sleep could be the politician’s sex. “Someone should do a Freudian analysis of this thing, being a politician. It’s all a matter of orality. It’s the most oral people who get along. My tongue feels like a hippopotamus’s. It’s all a matter of tongue and lips. It’s so strange for me, so different from my practice as a writer. I used to feel that if I talked about something I had lost it. I would go out to do an article. When I came back and my wife asked me what I thought about it, I wouldn’t talk. That’s why I feel I couldn’t do a book about this.”

“What do you think about him?” Schwartzman asked me afterwards.

It was a question Mailer sometimes asked his staff after a meeting; it
was a question the staff often asked reporters they had got to know. It was the burden of glamour: Mailer’s staff required him never to fail, even in a short exchange with a reporter.

“F
RIDAY’S
a fun day,” Banning said. “He’s going to the races at Aqueduct.”

“Fun?” I said. “You mean no campaigning?”

“There are going to be seventy thousand people there.”

The special express trains funnelled them in from Manhattan and Brooklyn; and from the platform, level with the floor of the coaches, they poured down the covered ramp to the stand, spoiling the symmetry of the arrangement only when they broke out into the sunlight—the wide car-parks glinting like the open sea—to get to the two-dollar gates. First on the covered ramp (leading to the five-dollar gates) and then in the sunlight, Mailer and his party stood, facing the rush: Breslin, the columnist, more popular than Mailer here, Mailer in light check trousers and a blazer, smiling shyly, Mailer’s wife, small, an actress, in a sober olive outfit, now part of the campaign.

The crowd swirled past them. But, like pebbles on a smooth beach, the campaign party was a disturbance, and disturbance built up around them: swift handshakes, an exchange, a little crowd, enough for the cameras, and even a little sound off-camera. “I’ve been thinking about this guy. I wanted to see him. He’s in favour of dual-admission.” “You haven’t got a ghost of a chance, ya bum!” Then the party, going through the five-dollar gates, were taken up the escalators to the concourse, where they were soon untraceable.

I fell in with a young man, equally lost, from Liberation News Service. He was hairy and hippyish and aggrieved. He had had to fight his way into the campaign car that morning and he hadn’t even had an interview with Mailer. He showed me a transcript he had made of his conversation with Banning.

“B
ANNING:
Look, we need coverage from you New Left nuts like a hole in the head … You got to get votes from a lot of strange places to win in this town … He needs support from the left like he needs a shit haemorrhage.”

“Mailer isn’t offering an alternative to American politics,” the man
from Liberation News said, as we walked through the crowd, looking for the campaign. “He’s offering only a distorted version of the old style.”

The bright green centre of the track was patterned with flowers; in the distance the jets rose one after the other from the permanent kerosene haze over Kennedy Airport.

“The trouble is that Mailer sees himself as an existential hero. In America, where action is frowned on among intellectuals, the existential hero would say, ‘The worst thing in the world is boredom. We must create drama by our own actions.’ Mailer creates this excitement, without giving an analysis of why that world is boring and dull. He says, ‘It is boring and dull, but it will be interesting if I inject myself into it.’”

Existential:
it was a Mailer word I was beginning to learn; it explained much of what I had felt about the campaign, its glamour and ambiguity. He was only nineteen, the Liberation News man, but the fluency of the American young no longer surprised me.

“What is most important is that when Mailer is defeated it won’t be said that he’s been defeated by the unworkable and corrupt New York City system. It will be said that it was his individual failure. As a critical man he will have lost a marvellous opportunity of exposing the undemocratic nature of American politics.”

It was easy to see why Banning didn’t want him around. Just then, though, the Liberation News man very badly wanted to see Banning: he had forgotten a roll of exposed film in the campaign car.

We ran into one of the TV cameramen. I asked him how he assessed the day’s campaigning.

“Oh, we’ll make it look bigger.”

“Is that official policy?” the man from Liberation News asked.

“We make everything bigger.”

Outside the restaurant—Mailer having a slow lunch inside—we saw Banning, brisk and businesslike. His beard barely lifted; he ignored us.

“He
hates
me,” the man from Liberation News said, and looked down at his soft suede boots.

I wanted company back to Manhattan. I gave the man from Liberation News some of my notes and persuaded him to forget his exposed film. The train was full of boys and girls, red from the beach. Everyone in the Mailer campaign spoke of the sickness of the society. But to the visitor no city appeared richer in pleasure, and more organized for it. And
Mailer’s trip to the races made a three-column spread, with a photograph, in the
New York Times:
that was the reality of our afternoon excursion.

“T
HE THING
about this campaign,” the girl in headquarters said, “is that it’s fantastically seductive.” She was twenty-four, thin, with a sharp little nose. “These boys here on the campaign are all like Norman. They have the same tremendous ego and this makes them fantastic to be with. They’re so fantastically alive every minute. Hardly anybody else is.” She herself came from New Jersey. “I had to leave because I was like a freak there. I am like”—she sighed, and her eyes widened behind her tinted granny glasses—“well, a socialist.” After the campaign she was going to do some summer work for GI Resistance. “It’ll be idealistic to say it’s because I have a brother in Vietnam. It’s more like, well, being addicted.”

“I don’t know how the whole concept of doing your own thing became so sacred,” Banning said when the campaign was over. “I don’t know whether it’s American or just youthful. I know how vicious the establishment is. I am twenty thousand dollars in debt—well, say fifteen thousand. But maybe I’m not as disillusioned as everybody else. Maybe everybody is uptight. Notice the difference between the Kennedy kids we had and the McCarthy kids. The Kennedy people want to win. The McCarthy-oriented types are addicted not just to lost causes but to a concept of lost causes. They just want to make a statement and stand around being right. ‘I know what is wrong, I’m noble.’ This I don’t buy.”

McCarthy types, Kennedy types, the New Left, the addicted, the Mailer-glamoured, the election-glamoured (bullhorns, loudspeaker cars, sticky labels): even with the heroic pattern-figure of Mailer, the wonder was that the campaign held together and looked professional, that the strains didn’t show more.

The reporters came and went. The press became better and better. Dustin, who was in charge of Advance, told me that the article by the agency girl had come out. “They must have cut a lot,” he said. There were occasional muted reports of internal trouble: a public outburst because of some carelessly displayed posters; an amateur art show not opened, Mailer’s wife going instead to speak the nice words Mailer couldn’t bring himself to speak. Then Banning lost his beard.

•   •   •

T
HE GLOOMIEST
day in headquarters was the Friday before the election. A Harlem rally had been planned for that day. But Clarence 27x Smith, a Black Muslim of some local renown, was shot dead in a lift in the morning (New York was always organized for drama, as it was for pleasure), and Mailer cancelled the rally. In headquarters they felt that Mailer had let them down; the show ought to have gone on. The cast and band of
Hair
, I was told, had been recruited and were game; black bodyguards could have been hired for a hundred dollars.

“Don’t ask Banning too many questions,” I was told. “He’ll hit you like Norman.”

Banning, tie-less, jacketless, with a beer-can, was dejected and acting tough. He said there was “an atmosphere of political death” over the campaign. I asked for the schedule. He mimicked my pronunciation. “Stick around,” he said. “You’ll hear.” It struck me for the first time that he would have a good microphone voice.

“It isn’t all Norman,” the girl from New Jersey said. “Half of this is that it’s all going to end on Tuesday and everybody on the campaign’s got to go back to not having power. Everything else is going to go on. This stops on June 17, this closeness and intimacy with people who have become your whole life. And these boys, they fight with Norman, but they go to the meetings. And when Norman gets up there and tells it like it is, they all dissolve and you can tell it in their eyes. It’s why they come the next day.”

Banning wasn’t in the office the next day. But Dustin and his wife and some others were, and after lunch we drove through the rain to Macy’s department store, where—but no one was sure—Mailer was campaigning among the shoppers. All we saw from the car were some very young volunteers offering damp leaflets; they didn’t know where Mailer was.

He and Mrs. Mailer were inside the store, as it turned out, until the guard asked them to campaign outside.

When we walked round the block we found them. Girl volunteers were asking people, “Have you met Mr. Mailer?” And the Mailers were shaking hands. Mailer looked worn, preoccupied, working only with his eyes; his hair, cut shorter, looked greyer. Mrs. Mailer was as composed as always. “I am an actress,” she said later. “This is the biggest audience I’ve played to.” A blind man stood beside Mailer, rattling his coins in a green cup and tapping his stick; his eyelids were sealed over hollow sockets so that his face, without expression, was like a dummy’s.

It was an extraordinary, smiling scene. The Mailers smiled; the people whose hands had been shaken smiled, and they waited, smiling, to see others have their turn. The girl volunteers smiled; we were all smiling.

“It’s
good,”
Dustin said, his gloom vanished. “We could win.” Dustin had been a Kennedy man.

Mailer, getting into the car, called Dustin over. A girl volunteer turned on me with big eyes. “I’m
crazy!”
A minute ago she had been demure. “I
love
him! I’ve read
all
his books. This is the first time I’ve
seen
him! I
love
him!” She sat down hard on the table with the campaign buttons. “I’m
crazy!”

Dustin came back, exultant. “He wants a motorcade.” Dustin liked motorcades.

Later, at the Sullivan Street fair—old brick houses with fire-escapes, the street muddy and littered, remote Italian women sitting with bandaged ankles and legs beside food-stalls and toystalls, sausages grilling over charcoal—Dustin and Mailer talked again.

“Look at them,” Dustin’s wife said. “Don’t you think they look a little alike, with the hair?”

O
N
M
ONDAY
, at the last press conference, Mailer bounced back to form after a tired, constricted TV appearance the previous day. Banning was there, friendly again, in a suit, stage-managing again. The four motorcade cars were waiting outside. A German producer said, “The film in Germany is finished. It was shown Saturday night.” A girl with a foreign accent was told that press seats were reserved for the New York City press. Mailer, Mrs. Mailer and Breslin sat in the third car. Banning was in the loudspeaker car at the front; he was to do the talking.

“Mailer-Breslin and the fifty-first state. You’ve had the rest. Choose the best.”

It was the motorcade slogan. The story was that it had been suggested to Mailer by a Negro. Banning didn’t like it, but he was speaking it with conviction. On Broadway there were some waves and shouts. But Harlem, with its sullen privacies, where garishness and dereliction appeared one and indivisible, was silent. In the South Bronx the advertisements were in Spanish; and Banning—a new talent revealed—spoke in Spanish:
“… dos coches atrás, en el carro abierto …”
His accent was
good. But there was no response from the pavements. The motorcade slowed down in the traffic, merged into it.