Stephen M. Tart

September 25, 2012

Book Review

“Who’ll Stop the Rain?”

Any thematic reading of ’s Armies of the Night demands a rereading of

the eminent Victorian Matthew Arnold’s elegy “Dover Beach”. As indicated on the front

flap of Armies first edition, Mailer’s book on the October March on the Pentagon in ’68 takes its title from the poem’s coda where Arnold shares with his audience his estimation of the human condition,

…the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor , nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night. (l. 30-7, p.74)

Matthew Arnold himself was a social conservative that gave himself over to civil service

in his occupation as a schools inspector. What is interesting about Arnold is that despite an illustrious early career as a poet, he would discontinue writing poetry as he felt he could not write poems that offered his reader hope. As he relates in his Essay in

Criticism, for Arnold what defines a classic poet is his ability to offer his reader hope. In the same essay, he considers the span of English poetry and identifies those he considers classics of the language. The list is quite short. Given this, a close reading of “Dover

Beach” reveals why it is Arnold forsake poetry and gave himself over to prose.

“Dover Beach” represents Arnold’s take on life in Industrial England and is a song of mourning. He begins “Dover Beach” by beckoning his audience to a window overlooking the straits of Dover. The tide is at its full and the sound of “the grating roar/ Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, /At their return” impresses itself upon his mind.

For Arnold, the sound itself bears “the eternal note of sadness”. He is reminded that the tragedian Sophocles heard it too, and for Sophocles the sound brought to “his mind/ The turbid ebb and flow of human misery.” “Turbid” is of course the word makes Arnold’s insight ulterior. Suffering, its causes, and reality are often rather muddy affairs. The existence of unmerited suffering speaks to the point. Fortuna remains blind, and the tragic cycle plays on ad infinitum. For Arnold, the seascape and its sounds occasion another thought; he reminds his reader that like the tide below his window, “The Sea of Faith/

Was once, too, at the full” and describes it as having been like “the folds of a bright girdle furl'd” around the shoulders of the world. But as for his age, all he can hear is the Sea of

Faith’s “long withdrawing roar” to the drear edges of the world, and all that remains are naked shingles. Needless to say Arnold was of a religious bent. His father was a chaplain at the Rugby School. His son’s poem “Rugby Chapel” is as fine a piece of devotional poetry as you will find. Arnold’s rumination on his father and the Christian life includes a

meditation on what it means to be left alone within the rocks and wilderness (67-72)..

Like Arnold, Sophocles was a social and religious conservative. He was very much

invested in the religion of his day, and was distinguished as the keeper of the sacred

snake of Asclepius- the Greek God of healing. Sophocles’ religious sensibilities inform

his most well-known plays. In Antigone, Creon’s tragic loss is occasioned by his

willingness to put the laws of man before God. In Oedipus Tyrannos, the tragic hero’s

blasphemy and ill-treatment of the priest of Apolloand his unwillingness to pay heed to

the priest Teiresias’s warning results in a fate which occasions not only his tragic fall but

the coincidental suffering of his wife/mother and children/siblings- i.e. a tragic cycle.

Like Sophocles and Arnold, Mailer was himself a conservative. In the first section of his book, “History as Novel”, he repeatedly styles himself “a conservative”. In fact, in his

attendance at Washington during the four days which constitute the course of his

narrative, Mailer, a World War II veteran of the war in the Pacific, wears a three-piece

suit and sports a tie with his regimental colors He is given over to mention of his family

and has condemning remarks for homosexuals and onanists. He is proud of his wife’s

Christian upbringing and character. In as much, in his embrace of main stream socitel

values, he stands out from a large population of participants who draw from the ranks of

the , anarchists, black activists and communists whose colorful attendance and costuming is catalogued in his description of the congress and the speech-making which takes place at the Lincoln memorial just prior to the march.

What Mailer wants his reader to understand is that his alliance with this movement has less to do with the counterculture, and more to do with his moral objections to the indiscriminate nature of the air war waged by LBJ. And although reluctant to join in with a movement he feels to be ill-conceived and lacking concrete and political objectives, he follows the to its end. Initially, he and other members of the literati had been invited there to state and pledge their opposition to the war and to urge youth to the draft. Most were not expected to participate in the attempt to physically invade the

Pentagon. But what separates Mailer’s involvement from his literary fellows is his commitment to participate in the second phase of Direct Action and the attempt to break through the cordon of local state and federal police and officials which surrounded the building. As he explained to , it was not enough to break the law by counseling youth to burn their draft cards and evade the draft (an act of sedition under the

Selective Service Act for which none, it may be noted, of the participants was immediately nor ultimately arrested) (Mailer 72). According to Mailer, participation in the more radical second phase, led by the likes of Paul Ruben, with in tow, was vital if the public was to understand that the March was not just some thing.

In the “History as Novel”, he writes of his initial reluctance to lend his support to the

March and makes clear that having once been obliged, he made his decision to go whole hog. As he makes explicit in both the first and second section of his book, he regards the

anti-war movement as an unlikely and ill-assembled coalition between the Youth

Movement, the New Left, the Old Left, and the spectrum of Black Activists. He writes

that he felt that the movement itself, because of the diversity of this coalition, was amorphous and lacked a definitive political end. And yet, Mailer signs on, delivers two speeches, and commits a public act of civil disobedience: he sides with the radical fringe out of Berkeley and its attempt to occupy the Pentagon. He does all of this as he considers the war to be immoral and irreligious.

His first speech is delivered drunk at a media event held at the Ambassador Theater on

Thursday night. Chosen to M. C. that night, Mailer misses his curtain call, arrives late,

bourbon in hand, to find himself superarrogated. Determined to reassert his presence on

the stage, he seizes the microphone, and begins with a bellicose harangue, and rises to the

hectoring of the crowd. In the midst of his boozy oratorio he gives vent to his objections to the anti- war movement and vaunts,” I’m trying to say the middle class plus shit, I mean plus revolution, is equal to one big collective dead ass “(37). Further along in his diatribe, he promises a confession as he remembers that Brendan Behan had once argued,

“A public speaker may offer you two opportunities. Instruction or confession” (37).

Mailer chooses the latter route and exclaims, “I think of Saturday, and that March and do you know, fellow carriers of the holy unendurable grail, for the first time in my life I don’t know whether I have the piss or shit scared out of me most” (38). When someone in the audience offers him an encouraging cry, “We’re going to try to stick it up the government’s ass.” He shouts in rejoinder, “right into the sphincter of the Pentagon” (38). And of course the crowd goes nuts, but the literati (Robert Lowell, ,

and ) are distressed by what they perceive to be Mailer’s vulgarity and

oafishness. Their obvious displeasure registers with Mailer who falls in the role of M.C. and he introduces each MacDonald and Lowell without over much cynicism. However, in his conclusion Mailer makes good his point, as he explains that he had been late for the night’s proceedings as he” went upstairs to the men’s room… it was so dark… I missed the bowl… Forgiveness must rain…” (Note the pun) “But tomorrow they will blame the puddle on Communists which is the way we do things here in Amurrica… I am as full of shit as Lyndon Johnson… That’s what you got working for you, Lyndon Johnson’s dwarf alter ego. How do you like him? (49). In his own words, Mailer was there to “bring the presidency to the public” (51). And he does; he wants his listeners and readers to

understand that the obscenity of his conduct, discourse and language paled in comparison

to the moral depravity of the United States’ warfare in Vietnam; that LBJ’s notorious

personality and character had manifested itself in abominable acts of moral depravity. He

concludes his participation in the event in an outrageous fashion knowing that he may

have alienating his literary peers, but pleased in his “spirited” performance.

The second speech is literally a bookend for both sections of his book. He speaks to

reporters after two days and a night in detention having been jailed for his strong willed

attempt to enter the Pentagon. It is only after he is released upon bail, that he has

achieved what the sociologists term rhetorical situation. It is then that he voices his

conviction that the nation had become schizophrenic and that its war abroad was anything but Christian; in fact, it was quite the contrary. His speech to the press is terse, sober, and to his point. He begins be describing his love for his wife and what he sees as her

Christian character and bearing. He then admonishes his audience that the March and its aftermath were merely a harbinger of further radical opposition to the war if American foreign policy were not to change. He concludes, and it is here that Mailer comes closest to the tragic vision of Sophocles and Arnold who rued their respective societies’ decline in religious observance and faith; he opines “You see dear fellow Americans, it is

Sunday, and we are burning the body and blood of Christ in Vietnam. Yes we are burning him there, and as we do, we destroy the Christian foundations of this Republic, which is love and trust in Christ” (214).

The Armies of the Night is divided into two parts: “History as Novel” and “The Novel as

History”. In the first section Mailer, as befits a New Journalist, describes his involvement in the March on the Pentagon in the third person, treating himself as main character. It is in this longer section (216 pages) that he portrays his thoughts, feelings and subjective experience of the events surrounding his involvement. It is in this section that his political and philosophical despair over the war and the anti-war movement is made most plain. It is here that his theme is made manifest. The second part of the book (68 pages), “The

Novel as History”, is a description of how the March came to be, the method of its organization, and an account of its unfolding. In as such it is a valuable source of historical writing and offers a journalist’s insight to the March on the Pentagon.

List of Works Cited

Arnold, Matthew. Essays in Criticism. Norwood: Allyn and Bacon, 1923.

Norman. The Armies of the Night: History as Novel; The Novel as History. New York: The New America Library, Inc., 1968.