Books: The Weekend Revolution

THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT by Norman Mailer. 288 pages. New American Library. $5.95.

Early in this book, the author reports that Poet Robert Lowell remarked to him: "Norman, I really think you are the best journalist in America." Mailer refused to take it as a compliment. "Well, Cal," he replied, "there are days when I think of myself as being the best writer in America."

Lowell was offering up the current intellectuals' line on Mailer, and Norman was mouthing the perennial Mailer line on himself ("Me Mailer. Me champ"). But The Armies of the Night suggests that Lowell is wrong, and that Mailer may be closer to the truth. He is a rather lazy and often sloppy journalist, but he can still write like a streak. Whether that makes him the best writer in America is open to question, but this book, which Mailer labels "History as a Novel" and "The Novel as History," is a bravura performance.

Buoyant Bending. Since the work had ample exposure in Harper's magazine and Commentary, it is widely known by now that this is Mailer's attempt to build a Washington monument by providing a step-by-step account of what in the present perspective seems like a decidedly minor news event: the peace march and militant demonstration in Washington last October. Mailer does indeed cover all the accepted journalistic steps, from the ceremonial handing-in of draft cards at the Department of Justice to the activists' vain roughhouse attempts to storm the Pentagon.

But more important is the omnipresent hand of a born novelist, buoyantly bending and shaping each scene to his literary way, and successfully creating a single, superb, comic figure of the author himself. With a courageous measure of self-mockery, Mailer casts himself in the role of a black-humor antihero: a hard-drinking, self-important and snobbish dandy who, believing himself the star, is forever stumbling toward the camera, when all the time he is really only an extra, a bit player who will inevitably be cut out of the film.

Bark & Bite. Mailer indulges his hero with a splendid deadpan pomposity, reinforced by the fact that he refers to himself throughout in the third person. The reader first meets him in his Brook lyn Heights apartment, picking up a ringing telephone as if it were a pistol loaded for Russian Roulette. "On impulse, thereby sharpening his instinct as a gambler, he took spot plunges: once in a while he would pick up his own phone. On this morning in September, 1967, he lost his bet." The caller is a militant antiwar organizer and old Harvard classmate, who extracts from Mailer a promise to participate in the Washington protests and thus give up a valuable weekend. The lost weekend really starts off when Norman, very much in his bourbon cups at a fund-raising evening in a theater, urinates on the floor of a darkened men's room. He then goes on to bully his fellow speakers with arrogant bluster and to bawdy his audience with testy obscenity—for which he offers a spirited defense. He uses it to wake up people, he claims. Besides, he discovered in the Army that it is the common man's humor and, in a way, the voice of his history ("the truth of the way it really felt over the years passed on a river of obscenity").