Mailer Marginalia

 In his great history of the footnote as a literary form, Anthony Grafton argues that the essential innovation of the footnote was to introduce a structure of parallel narrative to historical writing. Once footnotes became the default method of citation in historical scholarship, that is, works of history now came equipped with not one, but two ongoing narratives: first, the author's primary chronological narrative, and second—the sly, often more ironical, discursive editorial narrative that accompanies it through the footnotes. 

The reader of a work of history thus has two voices going in their head at the same time, as they work their way through the book: the main historical narrative, plus the editorial commentary. 

Reading Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night this week, I was listening to two parallel narrative tracks as well—but for different reasons (the book does not have footnotes). 

I acquired my paperback copy of this classic "nonfiction novel" from a used bookstore in Providence. The previous owner had evidently been a student at Brown. Doubtless, she had been assigned the book for a class—as her reaction to the book bore all the hallmarks of disgruntlement and frustration that come from being an unwilling captive of Mailer's writing—rather than a willing accomplice in his prose. A Prisoner of Text, if you will. 

I know how she felt about the book because she made those feelings very clear in the way she read and marked up the book. My copy of the volume is full of her sarcastic commentary, underlinings, and markings—at least for the first third or so—amounting, in Grafton-style, to a fully-fledged parallel editorial narrative. And so, as I made my way through the book, I had the unique experience both of hearing Mailer's braggadocio droning in one ear—and her groans and sighs over his vanity in the other. 

(In some cases, her best and most eloquent commentary came not from the words scrawled in the margins, though, but from pointed underlinings and crossings-out that spoke volumes. A blurb praising Mailer in the book's front-matter, for instance, has had the single word "outrageous" underlined and check-marked; while the phrase "dazzlingly impish advertisement for himself" has had the word "dazzlingly" crossed out, with only the rest of the phrase underlined for emphasis and implied endorsement.)

My own reaction to Mailer's book was more positive than hers (though I did enjoy her "uggghhs" and dismissive "eye rolls" at some of the worst examples of the author's characteristic machismo and bombast). It's true that Mailer makes himself the star of his own story and opens his account of a march on the Pentagon, not with any historical or political analysis of the war in Vietnam (though he does get to that), but with a detailed, blow-by-blow narrative of how he pissed on the floor and drunkenly hogged the microphone at the event's opening rally. 

Yes, it's obscene and narcissistic. Yes, Mailer can't help but make a spectacle of himself. But that's what makes him so much fun. The first hundred pages of the book or so were like brain-candy to me. I couldn't get enough. 

Plus (as should already be clear from that synopsis) Mailer's relentless fixation on himself is as much self-deprecating as it is self-aggrandizing. He is the anti-hero of his own story; not just the hero. The book opens with his description of his own brain as a potholed lunar landscape—"Swiss cheese"—from all the drugs and alcohol he has consumed over the years—a self-inflicted wound on his nervous system he insists gave him the "illusion he was a genius." 

Mailer, despite his machismo, also confesses to the fear and impatience he felt at various moments at the prospect of being arrested and jailed in a civil disobedience action. He acknowledges forthrightly his selfish desires to escape, to avoid the inconvenience of political engagement, and get back to New York in time for a dinner party. He cops to the element of egotism that kept him in the action, despite this hankering after creature comforts—the desire for heroism and for the grand gesture. And it takes a certain abnegation of egotism—a certain willingness to shed dignity—to admit that such egotism is nearly always a part of the psychology of the civil resister. 

Finally, Mailer tells the story of his own arrest without making himself out to be more heroic than he was. He observes frankly that some of the other arrestees at the action were willing to make much bigger sacrifices than he. He says that there are always higher rungs on the "ladder" of sacrifice and moral engagement, and he admits that he was willing to step off well below the highest one—even if it cost him some "nausea" of guilt at his own "failure of nerve" to do so. (Anyone who can admit to their own human residuum of physical cowardice in this way is clearly not entirely far-gone on the ego-trip after all.)

Most powerfully of all—when he eventually turns to depicting the real suffering and heroism involved in the March on the Pentagon, he takes himself out of the narrative. When he talks about the beatings that protesters endured at the hands of cops and soldiers—he is no longer shining the spotlight on Norman Mailer; but on the nameless women (primarily women) and men who took a billy-club to the face that day. After he has himself escaped imprisonment early, due to some clever lawyering and a timely appeal that enabled him to post bail—he turns back, like Lot's Wife, to consider the sacrifices of those who stayed behind. 

In the book's single most powerful and haunting passage—with which he closes his account—he considers the Quaker activists who refused to sign plea agreements with the government and engaged in nonviolent non-cooperation with prison rules. Most were thrown into solitary confinement for their trouble. There—Mailer asks—"Did they pray, these Quakers, for forgiveness for the nation? Did they pray with tears in their eyes in those blind cells with visions of a long column of Vietnamese dead, Vietnamese walking a column of flame, eyes on fire, nose on fire, mouth speaking flame, did they pray, 'Oh Lord, forgive our people for they do not know[?]"

Mailer, then—that notorious egotist—only actually puts himself on center-stage when he is talking about missing the toilet while trying to urinate in the midst of a drunken fugue, or boring his audience with an incoherent monologue while attempting to MC their proceedings. 

Once it comes time to talk about genuine heroism, genuine moral courage—he shifts the lens over to the Quakers shivering in isolation in the Hole—doing penance for the nation's sins. 

An author who was truly the irrepressible narcissist Mailer is often accused of being wouldn't be capable of the gesture. And it gains profound poetic force for being so unexpected—Mailer has carried us all the way from the inferno of egotism in the book's opening chapters—where we assume at first the whole book is going to be this type of navel-gazing—to this paradise of self-abnegation and transcendent idealism in the final pages. 

That's why this book is indeed an American classic. 

But what are we to make of its historical and political concerns in our own time? One could see in its haunting images of burning Vietnamese villages or napalmed children a warning about our current government's murders-by-drone in the Pacific and Caribbean: or the rumors of war that we are now getting from the newspapers—the intimations from the Miami Herald this morning, for instance, that the Trump administration may be about to escalate its campaign in South America by directly striking targets inside Venezuela. 

Or perhaps we see in The Armies of the Night a preview of the campus battles of our time over U.S. support for Israel in the Gaza war.

Indeed, the Brown student marking up her copy of Mailer's book seemed to interpret it in this light. Some of her marginal comments wrestle with her own moral indecision about whether or not to join the campus protests over Gaza; her own fears of the sacrifices that such engagement would entail (which are indeed steep, as universities across the country have cracked down on pro-Palestinian campus activism, and the Trump administration increasingly shreds the Bill of Rights). She crawls in the margin at one point (next to a passage in which Mailer wrestles with the same quandary): "Wait am I being like him rn?"

(There is even a reference in one of the marginal notes to the hunger strike that a number of Brown students undertook last year to protest the Gaza war and call for the university's divestment from Israel.)

Of course, many have made the comparison before between the anti–Vietnam War protests of the late '60s and the anti–Gaza war protests of the last two years. 

I tended to find this an imperfect analogy, though. We like to look back on the antiwar movement of the '60s, after all, as a time of relative left-wing unity—whereas, the Gaza war was incredibly divisive among America's liberals—pitting different Democratic constituencies against each other. 

Plus—I thought—back in the Sixties the message of "U.S. out of Vietnam" was pretty straightforward. It's hard to butcher that slogan or get too far off-script. 

Whereas, a lot of the ways people chose to message their opposition to the Gaza war were rife with moral pitfalls—indeed, chasms. (When I would walk past signs on campus reading things like "Glory to the Martyrs," for instance, my stomach would turn. It did indeed seem that much of the Gaza protest crowd failed consistently to show any kind of message-discipline. Instead of focusing on civilian casualties and the unbearable costs of war to both sides of the conflict—they sounded an awful lot at times like they were actually endorsing Hamas terrorism.)

But Mailer's account reveals that the '60s really weren't the halcyon days of left-wing unity after all; nor was the antiwar movement back then so much more ethically pure and consistent. Mailer observes that 1967 was in fact a pretty bad year for left-wing unity—and for largely the same reason that 2023 and 2024 were bad years: namely, disagreements about Israel. '67 was the year of the Six-Day War, after all. 

"Many of the Old Left and many members of the liberal peace groups were Jewish, and enraptured with Israel," Mailer writes; "more of the Old Left, also Jewish, remained true to the rigorous coils of certain more or less Trotskyist and Communist positions, which left them therefore beached as apologists for Nasser (a miserable position since he had bragged of the future burning of Israelis). Worse, the Black Militants were almost entirely for the Arabs. The New Left in its turn was therefore seriously divided."

Well, that sounds awfully familiar. I'll never forget the day after October 7, 2023, when I walked by the Black students organization on campus—and saw a Palestinian flag flying there, alongside the BLM flag—apparently for the first time. Coming on that day—at that moment—it was hard to read that sudden decision to hang the Palestinian flag as anything other than a nod of endorsement toward what Hamas had just perpetrated the day before. 

That moment will always go down in my memory as probably the nadir of the modern American left—the worst time to be a leftist in my memory. 

But, it turns out, 1967 may not have been as different as I thought.

As for "message discipline," meanwhile—it actually sounds like the Left had as many problems with this in 1967 as they do today. "Glory to the martyrs," they say now—seeming to confuse a call for peace with an endorsement of jihadi terrorism. Likewise, in 1967, some of the "peace" protesters who decided to show up to the March on the Pentagon did so waving NLF flags. It seemed that their objection was not so much to war in general—as that they wanted the other side to win. 

(The poet Robert Lowell and Mailer himself, when it comes time to get arrested, have to make sure they do so in a spot where the TV cameras will not show NLF flags rippling behind them. Even Mailer—while he hates to make any concession to middle-class respectability—is forced to concede that "it was difficult enough for people to take him seriously without standing next to that flag!")

The Left was just as much of an incompetent, mixed-up mess in 1967, it appears, as they are now. But still—for all their muddled messaging and morally and strategically–compromised decision-making—it's easy to see now that they were broadly on the right side of history, when it came to the war in Vietnam. 

So too, I think we can admit now that—however distasteful some of their messaging may have been—the campus left of 2023-4 was basically right about the war in Gaza. What's more: they were right about it for the same reasons the Left was right about Vietnam. 

Mailer's own analysis of why the Vietnam War was ultimately indefensible—simple as it may be—applies equally strongly to U.S. and Israeli actions in Gaza as well. Indeed, reading these words in 2025, I couldn't help but think of the civilian victims of Israeli warplanes and bombs purchased with U.S. military aid:

"All wars were bad which undertook daily operations which burned and bombed large numbers of women and children;" Mailer writes. "[A]ll wars were bad which relocated populations [...] all wars were bad which had no line of battle or discernible climax[.]" 

By every one of these measures—then—was not the Gaza war the very definition of a "bad war"? 

I say "was"—using the past tense—but of course—that's me being perhaps overly optimistic. It's not so clear the war is over as Trump now likes to claim. 

Just two days ago, after all, the ceasefire appeared to fall apart again for a few hours. An Israeli soldier was killed; and in retaliation—Israel (again, as always, with U.S. funding and support) killed an estimated 100 people with bombs, including (according to the Gaza health ministry) 40 children. 

Daily operations which bombed and burned women and children... relocated populations... no discernible climax. 

Yes, indeed, this is indisputably a bad war; an indefensible war. 

And who will do penance for our nation's sins this time? What Quakers will suffer in solitary in order to purchase us a bit of indulgence for those long lines of dead—Palestinian dead in Gaza; 61 people dead in drone killings on the high seas in the Pacific and the Caribbean; people burned to death without charge or trial, "eyes on fire, nose on fire, mouth speaking flame"?

Oh who, this time, will "heal our everlasting sinfulness"—as Vachel Lindsay once put it—"and make us sages with transfigured faces"?