unearthly silver . The essay wasn ’ t immediately concerned with race and skin colour at all , but with the “ psychic havoc ” wreaked on the world by the atom bomb and the Shoah , events which had rendered death almost meaningless as the numbers of the fallen rose anonymously .
In the single year before Kind of Blue was recorded , and under the terms of the Project 58 / 58A , the US military launched Operation Hardtack I , a series of 35 nuclear tests in the Pacific Proving Grounds , remote , uninhabited atolls reduced to poisoned craters by ever-larger thermonuclear devices whose detonation was often closely watched by military personnel . Just as Kind of Blue and Psycho seem connected by some deep thread in the American psyche , so too the quiet , introspective murmur of Miles ’ trumpet and the inhuman roar of detonated warheads is made part of a wider and more ambiguous national project . Miles ’ lonely individualism is set against an armoury that threatened the whole of mankind . Against this background , Mailer had called for the emergence of a new kind of figure , a version of the French existentialist hero , aware that modern reality is de trop (“ too much !” was also a hipster ’ s cry of slightly pained approval ; a jazz solo or a sharp new suit was , literally , de trop ). The new kind of hero , who inevitably borrowed something from Nietzsche as well , drew on imperatives which were larger than the rational mind , capable of working swiftly and dangerously in the interstices . Mailer ’ s controversial ideal was a violent outlaw , a hipster who had somehow introjected the nerve-ends and instincts of the urban African-American and learned to function in a hostile reality .
Almost a decade after his controversial Dissent essay , Mailer tried to bring this character to life in his novel An American Dream , which in homage to Charles Dickens was serially written , giving Mailer no chance to go back on a plot twist , but to follow it improvisationally
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