Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 99

Stranded in the Sixties:
The Politics of Mailer’s
Armies of the Night
In The White Negro (1957), Norman Mailer declared it
"impossible to conceive a new philosophy until one creates a new
language . .
(287). Over the following decade his language
managed to offend reviewers across the whole critical spectrum, from
Life magazine to The New York Review of Books. His work was
called coarse, trivial, scatological, and more positively, an atrocity
upon his talent. Granville Hicks, reviewing Why Are We in
Vietnam? for The Saturday Remew, concluded that Mailer "had set
out to put an end to the literary use of four-letter words by making the
reader everlasting tired of them . . . " (qtd. Manso 454).
It is telling, however, that Hicks went on to complain about
Mailer's drift into "nonliterary matter" (Manso 454). Mailer’s
language was all the more offensive because it embodied the idiom of
a new, "nonliterary" politics—notably that of the New Left. Early in
the fifties Mailer had treated, in Barbary Shore, the rift between
the prewar and postwar Left. Now, in the late sixties, his interest
turned to the even more decisive schism between the Old and New
Left (Leeds 248). The latter. Mailer came to believe, was the
intellectual vanguard of a growing army of dissent. In a massive act
of civil dis obedience-the October 1967 March on the Pentagon-this
army took a dramatic stand in what Mailer would proclaim the
Second Civil War (Merrill, Armies 135).
If the March were that significant, then its message had to
involve more than a protest against the Vietnam war. What was
that message? Neither of the armies confronting each other across
the Pentagon parking lots had any clear idea of their larger
objectives—hence Mailer's allusion to Arnold's lines from "Dover
Beach":
. . . 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.