Books: The Ticket That Exploded

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MANAGING MAILER by Joe Flaherty. 222 pages. Coward-McCann. $5.95.

"What we are running on," New York Mayoral Candidate Norman Mailer told the voters last year, "is one basic simple notion, which is that till people see where their ideas lead, they know nothing." For years Mailer has been following and accepting the consequences of his own ideas, most notably those about the revitalizing effects of physical violence. Indeed, the main point that lunges out of former Campaign Manager Joe Flaherty's shrewdly conceived, vigorously written and entertaining account of Mailer's Visigothic raid into forum politics is the novelist's need to test his genius in constant confrontation. Many voters may have been fascinated by a man of Mailer's dark, risky imagination. But in the end, they didn't want their city to marry one.

Radical Conservative. To begin with, there was the problem of the campaign slogan: "No more bullshit." In fact, to discuss the Mailer campaign without generous samples of the excesses that salted his speeches and staff communications would be like discoursing on American democracy without mentioning De Tocqueville. Fornication and cancer are used so often as aggressive metaphors that they seem to take on the roiling essence of Mailer himself.

Admirers of the writer will not find this surprising. In his books, creation and destruction are rendered as one indistinguishable and irresistible life force. By extending this seemingly paradoxical vision into his political career, Mailer could claim to be a radical conservative−a candidate who could honestly run on a platform of "Free Huey Newton−end fluoridation." The ultimate contradiction implicit in Mailer's radical conservatism was his argument that New York City should become a separate state composed of totally autonomous neighborhoods. If a neighborhood voted for compulsory church attendance on Sunday, so be it. If the majority in another area wanted compulsory free love, that was all right too. What would happen to a celibate atheist who lived in either area is never made clear. Presumably he would have to abandon his convictions or start his own neighborhood.

As candidate for city council president, Mailer picked Jimmy Breslin, an ex-newspaperman who got so much practice writing fiction as a columnist for the late Herald Tribune that he had little trouble producing the bestselling comic-Mafia novel, The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight. Mailer-Breslin was a ticket compounded of booze fulminate of mercury, and laughing gas It was too volatile to survive. There was also the problem of Mailer's vanity. Near the end of the campaign says Flaherty, Mailer encouraged some of his staff to shave off their beards as a gesture of loyalty, and curtly rejected scripts for spot radio announcements in favor of an abominable jingle from his own pen.