their own quests for identity, but it also lent a certain vagueness and lack of color to the narratives, so that neither Lovett nor O’Shaugnessy was quite believable. They lacked the complex, idiosyncratic style Mailer was to develop inAdvertisements for Myself (1959).

When Mailer decided to use himself—his troubles, his doubts, his conceits—his style developed and prospered. His theme was still the same, the trials of the individual in his confrontation with society, but now that confrontation was much more convincingly portrayed in the light of a complicated and often comic personality willing to delve very deeply into his own faults and follies. The impact of Mailer’s fiction is palpable in An American Dream, in which the first-person narrator, Stephen Rojack, has a mind that is as agile as Mailer’s own.

In The Armies of the Night, Mailer’s discovery of himself as a character capable of representing the conflicting forces of the country receives its most effective treatment. The style is successful because it is Mailer’s third-person commentary on himself as he takes up the protest against the Vietnam War by joining a march on the Pentagon. Referring to himself as a “left Conservative” is a canny way of expressing the contradictions in himself, of the middle-aged writer who is reluctant to give up his privileges to play the part of dissenter and yet who realizes that his creative power and insight often come when he finds himself in opposition to the status quo.

None of Mailer’s subsequent nonfiction equals the complexity of The Armies of the Night, although Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Of a Fire on the Moon, Marilyn, and The Fight all contain extended passages that rival his best autobiographical work. The Executioner’s Song, however, marks a return to the naturalistic method of The Naked and the Dead. Its cast of characters, depiction of the western landscape, and evocation of the eastern interests that turn Gilmore’s story into a media event far outclass his first novel’s understanding of society and politics.

Embedded in The Executioner’s Song is a quest to understand the very underpinnings of human identity, of the way the American character is related to human nature, and of the way life in the twentieth century United States was but an extension of the eternity of which Gilmore, for example, is sure he partakes. Notions of reincarnation and of karma inform much of Mailer s fiction and nonfiction since the early 1960’s; they culminate in Ancient Evenings, in which he creates a time and a land (ancient Egypt) that function on magic, telepathy, and reincarnation.

The Naked and the Dead

First published: 1948

Type of work: Novel

General Cummings sends a patrol to scale Mount Anaka as part of a strategy to destroy Japanese resistance on the island of Anopopei.

The Naked and the Dead, Mailer’s first published novel, was hailed for its riveting depiction of men in war, beset not only by the vicissitudes of battle but also by their social backgrounds and personal problems. Mailer put his brief combat experience to good use, beginning his novel by describing what it feels like to travel on a troop ship, cooped up with men from every part of the United States, anticipating combat but not knowing what it would really be like, and reflecting on life back home—traumatic childhood incidents, plans that were never accomplished, and dreams that remain unfulfilled.

Nearly half of the novel is used to build up the complex social context of the soldiers who will be picked for the dangerous mission to scale Mount Anaka behind enemy lines. In characters such as Roth and Goldstein, Mailer reveals the anti-Semitism rampant in the Army and the efforts of Jews either to ignore the prejudice or to prove their courage and loyalty. Slowly the soldiers on patrol learn to work together as a unit, even as Mailer interrupts the narrative of their approach to the mountain with flashbacks to their civilian lives. Detailed accounts of the irascible Gallagher’s life in Boston, easy-going Wilson’s love life in the South, and Croft’s rather sadistic life in Texas punctuate the conflict and the cooperation of the men on patrol.

Juxtaposed with the lives of common soldiers are the stories of the officers, the higher-ups who give the orders and plot the strategy of the war. General Cummings, a deeply conservative and aloof man, the product of a troubled childhood and of a first-class education, seeks to mold his army into an instrument of his own will. He is opposed in this by Harvard-educated Lieutenant Hearn, who rejects Cummings’s incipient fascism and disputes his authority. Attracted by Hearn’s intelligence, Cummings does not believe that Hearn really takes his liberal scruples seriously. Cummings is lonely and would like to groom a protégé, but when Hearn proves resistant and goes so far as mashing his cigarette into the immaculate floor of the fastidious general’s tent, Cummings decides to teach Hearn a lesson by dispatching him as leader of the patrol charged with climbing Mount Anaka as part of the plan to surprise the Japanese and to take the island of Anopopei away from them.

On patrol, Hearn learns what it means to lead men. He would rather not be a dictator, but Croft—used to having his own way with the men—becomes an adversary. Just when Hearn believes he may have established his dominance, Croft leads him into a Japanese ambush, and Hearn is quickly killed by a bullet. Cruelly driving the men up the mountain, the maniacal Croft is clearly the counterpart of Cummings, certain that he can impose a pattern on history and make it subordinate to his will. The whole mission finally collapses when the exhausted men accidentally stumble into a beehive and are stung into a terrified run down the mountain.

Eventually Japanese resistance crumbles—not because of Cummings’s strategy but merely because of exhaustion. Cummings is not even present when his second-in-charge, Major Dalleson, a competent but unimaginative officer, has to take responsibility for handling the rout of the Japanese. Both Cummings and Croft are thwarted, but neither the disaffected men on patrol nor the liberalism represented by Hearn suggest an effective counter to the reactionary forces that appear to be still in control at the end of the novel.

An American Dream

First published: 1965

Type of work: Novel

Stephen Rojack, a psychology professor and television personality, murders his wife, Deborah, and sets off on a heroic quest of rebirth.

Several reviewers of An American Dream were outraged at the premise of the novel: A man murders his wife and not only gets away with the crime but also actually becomes a better man, finding a new inner strength and appetite for life. Feminist critics attacked Mailer for his misogyny, professing to see a pattern in much of his work that demeaned women while elevating the heroic nature of men. Other critics simply found the novel itself unpersuasive and Rojack a rather ridiculous specimen—like Mailer himself, out to establish some concept of heroism that said more about the deficiencies of the author than about the society or the characters Mailer was ostensibly treating.

Later critics of the novel were much more sympathetic, praising the novel for its stylistic virtuosity and courage in probing the tensions and violence of contemporary life. They were willing to grant Mailer his subject matter and believed that it was beside the point to fret about the morality of Rojack’s murder. Mailer had not presented it as simply good or evil but as an act that reflects Rojack’s desperation and extreme desire. He both loves and hates Deborah, and their physical struggle that results in his strangling her is caused by his sudden urge to relieve himself of the grip she has held on his life.

Deborah is vicious. She reminds her husband of everything he has not accomplished, and her words wound a man who came out of the war a hero and with the same kind of promise that put him into politics with John F. Kennedy in Congress. Rojack’s career, however, had not prospered. His stature as an eccentric professor of psychology and television personality is scorned by his wealthy wife, who turns to more prominent men—perhaps even to Kennedy himself, she seems to imply in referring to her lovers.

The point about Rojack’s murder is that it forces him to act on his own, to become his own man, and to jettison all supports—such as his reliance on Deborah and on her father to help him return to politics. In order to justify himself, Rojack engages in the most extravagant actions—toughing out a confrontation with gangsters when he becomes interested in Cherry, one of their girlfriends, stomping and throwing Shago Martin (Cherry’s former lover) down the stairs, confronting his father-in-law, Barney Oswald Kelly, who would just as soon have Rojack killed for what he suspects Rojack has done to Deborah, and walking the parapet outside Kelly’s apartment in an almost mystical effort to prove his courage.

Much of this seems foolhardy, even ridiculous, by the very naturalistic standards of character development that Mailer had adopted in The Naked and the Dead. Yet Mailer stubbornly sticks by his character’s excessive actions, implying that the only way Rojack can remake himself is to seek the death of his former self. The result is a character that transcends the boundaries of social background and individual pathology. Rojack comes to believe that he can indeed become another man, can invent a new style for himself.

The extent to which Rojack will ultimately succeed in sustaining a new identity is not clear. The novel leaves him on the road, traveling to Yucatan, mourning the death of Cherry, who has gotten caught in the revenge of her former lover’s friends seeking to murder Rojack for his roughing up of Shago Martin. Rojack has attained his new life at enormous cost to himself and has done nothing to ameliorate the evil of society’s powerful figures, like Kelly.

The Armies of the Night

First published: 1968

Type of work: Novel

A reluctant Mailer joins the march on the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War and to show solidarity with a younger generation of dissenters.

With The Armies of the Night, Mailer received the best reviews since the publication of The Naked and the Dead. Reviewers found his third-person treatment of himself as a character utterly convincing. Mailer’s narration seemed so credible because he dealt with all the important aspects of his character in conjunction with the complexity of events surrounding the march on the Pentagon. In other words, his original aim in The Naked and the Dead of showing the convergence of character and society was amply demonstrated in a mature, comic, and subtle work.

Mailer begins The Armies of the Night with his own reluctant agreement to participate in the march. He is at home trying to write when he gets a call from Mitchell Goodman, a friend urging him to come to Washington. At first, Mailer is petulant, advising Goodman that it behooves writers to write, not to engage in events that only take them away from their work. Mailer has to admit to himself, however, that he is not writing anything important at the moment and that he is really looking for excuses to duck a commitment.

Mailer’s ambivalence and early efforts to dominate events result in his drunken antics as master of ceremonies at the Ambassador Theater, where Robert Lowell, Dwight Macdonald, Paul Goodman, and other literary luminaries have gathered to read their work and to express their support for the march on the Pentagon. Mailer makes a spectacle of himself by trying to act the role of a literary Lyndon Johnson, trying to bully the crowd and mold it—like General Cummings—into an instrument of his will. This is a new generation, however, impressed with Mailer but hardly willing to have him dominate events. He is booed as much as he is cheered.

Sobering up and realizing that his attitudes toward draft resisters are ambivalent, Mailer joins the marchers with a newfound sense of modesty, hoping only to be arrested and quickly released to make a symbolic point. Instead, he is detained for many hours and is forced to probe his feelings about himself and about his middle-class life. The Armies of the Night becomes, in part, a coming to terms with his middle-aged self and his left conservatism, which is sympathetic to the young protestors but is not willing to take revolutionary action to change the fundamental bases of society. Instead, Mailer is comfortable moving within the power structure, trying to bore from within and examine its complacent beliefs and his own sometimes fatuous convictions.

The first half of The Armies of the Night, then, is what Mailer calls “the novel as history.” Through his personal lens, events unfold and are interpreted in the novelist’s quest for meaning. The second and shorter half of The Armies of the Night, “history as a novel,” is a more objective study of accounts of the march on the Pentagon, which shows how the march was planned and reported; it dwells on the discrepancies of press reports and demonstrates that those who purport to write “history,” no less than those who write novels, make constructs of events—imaginative projections of what they think happened, of what they saw from different points of view. The armies in Mailer’s title refer, therefore, not only to the clash between the protestors and the guardsmen at the Pentagon but also to different modes of perception. History and the novel are distinct genres, but they also have more in common than their practitioners are usually willing to admit. In writing both history and a novel, Mailer combines fiction’s immediacy and drama with history’s documentary quest for verification.

The Executioner’s Song

First published: 1979

Type of work: Novel

A vivid third-person account of the life and execution of murderer Gary Gilmore and of the societal forces that inform and are attracted to his singular story.

The Executioner’s Song appeared at a time when critics (and Mailer himself) had become tired of the way his personality tended to dominate everything he wrote. He wanted to find a subject that would be bigger than his ego and that would force him to write in a different style. Presented with a massive amount of material by Larry Schiller, who had bought the rights to Gilmore’s story, Mailer found that he had hundreds of characters to work with, speaking on tape and in documents that amounted to a massive social novel which would ultimately cover virtually every region in the United States through the voices of people describing their involvement in Gilmore’s life.

Conducting new interviews and immersing himself in the thousands of pages of court record and press coverage, Mailer developed an objective, precise, spare voice that had the ring of authenticity, for it was a voice that did not seem to make any more of the experience than what a reader could observe in the accounts on the page.

The Executioner’s Song is divided into two parts, “Western Voices” and “Eastern Voices.” The first part begins with the release of Gilmore from prison and the efforts of his relatives to find him a decent job and place to live. Gilmore has trouble adjusting, coping with the everyday necessities of working, shopping, eating, and so on. He falls in love with Nicole Baker, a young woman he is sure he has met in another life, and whom he binds to himself with an intensity that drives him to despair when she leaves him. Committing two murders for no apparent reason—except for the implication that he shoots two clean-cut Mormon men rather than turn the gun on himself and Nicole—Gilmore decides in prison that he should be executed.

The second part of The Executioner’s Song details the media attention that Gilmore’s resolution to die inspires. Gilmore is articulate, determined, and contemptuous of the state. His defiance and his willingness to accept punishment fires the public imagination and provokes the interest of Schiller, who sees both book and film possibilities in Gilmore’s saga. In many ways, Schiller becomes Mailer’s surrogate, for in his previous books Mailer has put himself forward as the sensibility reporting on and shaping events. Now it is Schiller who assembles every piece of the story, getting exclusive rights and dealing directly with Gilmore. As in Mailer’s use of the third-person voice to describe himself in The Armies of the Night, his third-person depiction of Schiller is a brilliant way of showing how the reporter both reflects and shapes the events he covers.

A huge critical and popular success, The Executioner’s Song was praised as a great social novel giving a panoramic view of the United States. Mailer confessed that he could not have invented better characters. They were presented with a density and wealth of social detail that surpassed those of The Naked and the Dead, thus making The Executioner’s Song a comprehensive and convincing work.