The New Journalism of the Sixties
65
Adopting an autobiographic approach to coverage of the 1967 March
on the Pentagon in The Armies o f the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as
History, Mailer critiques the escalation of American involvement in the Vietnam
War and the moral worth of dissent against those escalation policies. In fact,
Mailer was one of the major participants in the March on the Pentagon, and
decided only afterward to write about it (at the urging of Willie Morris, former
editor of Harper’s).31 Since Mailer was a leading character in the event, his
autobiographic perspective is a view from the inside, and his emotions and
reactions help delineate the subjective reality of the demonstration.52
Mailer employs a third-person autobiographical form first popularized
by Henry Adams in The Education o f Henry Adams. The main character
becomes not "I” but "Mailer/’ According to Wolfe, this device only works when
"the writer takes the trouble to describe and develop his own character with at
least as much care as he would devote to any other main character/'33 In The
Armies o f the Night, Mailer succeeds in fully developing the protagonist's
emotions and psychic responses—a necessity for being able to
impressionistically evaluate the moral limits of American policies in Vietnam
and the ethical value of dissent. Pulling no punches in this exercise in selfexamination, Mailer observes:
Still, Mailer had a complex mind of sorts. Like a later
generation which was to bum holes in their brain on Speed, he
had given his own head the texture of a fine Swiss cheese.
Years ago he had made all sorts of erosions in his intellectual
firmament by consuming modestly promiscuous amounts of
whiskey, marijuana, seconal, and Benzedrine. It had given him
the illusion he was a genius, as indeed an entire generation of
children would come to see themselves a decade later out on
celestial journeys of LSD.54
As the subtitle suggests, Mailer simultaneously serves as novelist and
historian, with historical evidence offered in the form of personal observation
and participation, and in the "evidence” of emotional and psychic reactions to
events in the public sphere of society. Whereas conventional journalistic
practice would have focused on the number of protesters arrested on the steps of
the Pentagon and the level of force used by the U.S. Marshals to repel them,
Mailer takes a "tower” perspective to recor BF