THE ARMIES OF THF. his se\ lo be guilt-ridden; he is a neo- NIGHT, by . Victorian. And if he's cruel to others Penguin Books, 300 pp., $1.30. then lie's cruel to himself as well. It's a kind of existential therapy. Just write l ilt VIETNAM MORATORIUM in it like it is. wtes the famous American author. Mi. Norman Mailer, to attend the Septem­ lie blasts his way through the Amer­ ber demonstration. Would he mind ican Movement, past the liberal sharing the platform with Jane Fonda academic opponents of the war whose and dear old Dr. .Spock, hero of the only quarrel with the Great Society is IIo n ia n ’s Day set. toilet-trainer extra­ that they think it temporarily derang­ ordinaire' How about a dash of Dr. ed, jabs a couple of Oscar Wilde rights Cairns to top it off? And will Norm to left personalities like Paul Good­ write a book about it — about the de­ man. , frames the monstrators, and his role in the whole American Communist Party in a brief deal, and how the Daily Telegraph mis­ few lines, the spiritual deadness of its represented him. and the relationship dull old manipulating calculations, and between shit and Dr. Spock, and some dashes on commenting left and right, insights into the psychology of Jane the New Left, sex, Black Power, mor­ Fonda, T im e pin up girl? And what ality, tactics, revolution, violence, tele­ will lie sav about poor old |im . . . vision, history, American life, values, cops, Vietnam . . . We could find out, one day. perhaps. In the meantime however we have The " The death of America rides in on Armies of the Sight, Mailer's account the smog”. This is also what Mailer of the Washington anti-Vietnam de­ writes about; the death of America, monstration of October 1967. It's more the death of the society that set out than an account of a political demon­ to be the new Jerusalem, "the land stration, it's a deep and tortured look where a new kind of man was born at a sick society; "America, once a from the idea that God was present beauty of magnificence unparelleled, in every man not only as compassion now a beauty with a leprous skin." but as power . . ." And it's dying in a schizophrenic frenzy where hate and Mailer is a complex man. He's been power come together, where war and to the further shores of Hell, and back, sex meet, becoming interchangeable; stabbing one of his wives, consuming and the becomes the huge drugs and alcohol, burning holes in his production of Christianity gone wrong brain until, in his words, his head had and its aberrations (the twisted na- taken on "the texture of a fine Swiss palmed kids, the frightened young men cheese". Yet he has retained a hold shooting at the shadows of dark trees on life and not slipped off the razor's in the darker jungles) are the manifes­ edge. This he achieved via writing — tations of sex gone sour in a society novels, journalism, essays, poetry — that's shot holes in the minds of its putting into words his own concept children, stifling them, crippling them, of life and the truths that have been showing them reality in the TV com­ revealed to him. mercial. This is w’hat Mailer's about.

An egotist to be sure. Mailer is the And the real hero of it all is not hero of this work. But he deals with Mailer but the dissenting people of himself in the same tough-minded America of which Mailer is part. sharp way that he deals with others, lie catalogues his hang ups. He likes R. J. C a h i l l

80 AUSTRALIAN LEFT REVIEW— AUG.-SEPT., 1970