The Armies of the Night by Norman Mailer

First published: 1968

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: New Journalism

Time of plot: October, 1967

Locale: Washington, D.C., Virginia, and New York

Principal characters

• Norman Mailer, the author, a prominent novelist
• Mitchell Goodman, an author and political activist
• Edward de Grazia, a lawyer and friend of Mailer
• David Dellinger, coordinator of the march on the Pentagon
• Robert Lowell, a prominent American poet
• Dwight Macdonald, a prominent American critic
• William Sloane Coffin, Jr., a Yale University chaplain
• Benjamin Spock, a pediatrician and antiwar activist
• Walter Teague, a Leninist organizer jailed with Mailer
• Hirschkop, chief counsel for the demonstrators
• Scaife, U.S. commissioner who presides over Mailer’s arraignment
• Beverly Bentley, Mailer’s fourth wife

The Story:

On a September morning in 1967, Norman Mailer received a phone call from Mitchell Goodman, an old friend and a political activist, urging his participation in a demonstration the following month against the continuing Vietnam War. Mailer reluctantly agreed and, two days before the scheduled rally at the Pentagon, flew to Washington, D.C., from his home in New York.

Thursday evening, before going on to an assembly at the Ambassador Theater, Mailer attended a cocktail party at the home of a liberal academic couple. Discomfited by their bland benevolence, Mailer, who spent his time conversing with Dwight Macdonald, Robert Lowell, and Edward de Grazia, further offended the host by declining her food and walking away with her copy of his novel Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967). Arriving at the Ambassador Theater, where he was supposed to serve as master of ceremonies, Mailer first headed for the unlit men’s room, where, spotted by a reporter for Time magazine, he inadvertently urinated onto the floor. On stage at last, furious that the proceedings had begun without him, Mailer wrested control of the microphone from de Grazia. Tipsy and inspired, he delivered an elaborate monologue about Vietnam and America in a manner that both engaged and enraged his audience.

On Friday, Mailer went to the Church of the Reformation for a ceremony in which thirty to forty young men affirmed their refusal of military service. In the company of people he found too nice and too principled, Mailer then walked a mile and a half to the Justice Department, where he, William Sloane Coffin, Jr., Mitchell Goodman, Benjamin Spock, Robert Lowell, and others gave speeches, and 994 draft cards were turned in to officials.

Following Saturday breakfast with Lowell and Macdonald, Mailer joined a crowd variously estimated at between 25,000 and 225,000 that was assembling near the Washington Monument. He was piqued at not being asked to speak, but after speeches by numerous others, the throng proceeded across the Arlington Memorial Bridge toward the Pentagon in order to manifest opposition to the continuing war in Vietnam. Mailer was followed by a crew from the British Broadcasting Corporation, which was making a documentary about him. In the north parking lot, Mailer, seeking symbolic arrest and early release so that he could rejoin his wife in time for a party that evening in New York, was one of the first to cross the military police lines. Apprehended by a U.S. marshal and placed in a van for removal to the lockup, he had a hostile confrontation with a neo-Nazi also arrested during the demonstration. Mailer and dozens of other, mostly young, protesters were imprisoned in the U.S. post office in Alexandria, Virginia.

While impatiently awaiting arraignment, Mailer telephoned his wife, Beverly Bentley, an actress and a southerner whose military father reminded him of some of the U.S. marshals. The prisoners were transported again, to a government workhouse twenty miles away, in Occaquam, Virginia. When a Leninist named Walter Teague lectured fellow prisoners on political tactics, Mailer, who considered himself a “Left Conservative,” grew testy and helped defeat Teague’s proposal that the imprisoned protesters send a collective letter critical of national mobilization leadership.

Mailer spent an uncomfortable night in custody and was not called to court until the following afternoon. He was represented by Hirschkop, chief counsel for the demonstrators, who argued strenuously with U.S. commissioner Scaife in order to keep his client from having to spend an additional night in jail. Pleading nolo contendere, Mailer was assessed a sentence of thirty days but was released on his own recognizance pending appeal and returned home to New York.

After reading distorted accounts of the demonstration and of his own role in it in Time magazine and in The Washington Post, Mailer began to write his own version in two parts—a novelistic history of himself over four days, followed by a collective history consisting of his own ruminations on the historical context and the significance of the entire event. After recounting his personal experiences as a witness to and participant in the October, 1967, antiwar march, Mailer provided a more detached explanation of the context for the growing opposition to Pentagon policies. Criticizing the misperceptions and distortions of mainstream journalism, he offered an alternative overview of just what happened before, during, and after the incidents he described in the first section of his book. His experience culminated in the creation of The Armies of the Night, a hybrid of history and fiction that, for all of its critique of social disorder, concluded with a paean to America.

Bibliography

Bailey, Jennifer. Norman Mailer: Quick-Change Artist. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1979. Particularly attentive to Mailer’s creation of personae, Bailey analyzes The Armies of the Night as his finest achievement in fictional journalism.

Bufithis, Philip H. Norman Mailer. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1978. In a lucid survey of Mailer’s career, Bufithis pays particular attention to Mailer’s characterization of himself and to the presence of Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Ernest Hemingway in The Armies of the Night. Bufithis praises the book as unmatched in drama, energy, and wit since Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography.

Kazin, Alfred. “The Trouble He’s Seen.” In Critical Essays on Norman Mailer, edited by J. Michael Lennon. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986. Kazin’s extended and enthusiastic review places Mailer’s book within the context of his career and of American literature.

MacFarlane, Scott. “The Armies of the Night (1968): Meta-Journalism, Insta-History.” In The Hippie Narrative: A Literary Perspective on the Counterculture. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2007. A constructivist view of the novel, focusing on how it reflected the zeitgeist of the hippie counterculture.

Manso, Peter. Mailer: His Life and Times. New York: Washington Square Press, 2008. An exhaustive biography based on more than two hundred interviews, some of which provide multiple versions of the events in Mailer’s life.

Merrill, Robert. Norman Mailer. Boston: Twayne, 1978. Focusing on the unique structure of what he argues is Mailer’s most enduring work, Merrill examines its protagonist’s experience as a rite of purification.

Solotaroff, Robert. Down Mailer’s Way. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974. Noting the work’s parallels to Henry Adams, Solotaroff offers insightful analysis of the style and the distance between author and protagonist in The Armies of the Night.

Weingarten, Marc. The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, and the New Journalism Revolution. New York: Crown, 2005. Discusses The Armies of the Night and other works of the 1960’s new journalism, placing these works within the context of advocacy journalism and of the turmoil of their era.