Word: mailer
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...alone with his ego, holding it limp and spent in his hand, looking at himself in the bathroom mirror of his shame: And in the privacy of his brain, quiet in the glare of all that sound and spotlight, Mailer thought quietly, "My God, that is probably exactly what you are at this moment, Lyndon Johnson with all his sores, sorrows, and vanity squeezed down to five foot eight," and Mailer felt for the instant possessed, as if he had seized some of the President's secret soul...
Later, Saturday at the Pentagon, Mailer again confronts himself. With Lowell and MacDonald, he decides to get arrested. All he has to do is cross the military policy line and the deed is done. "Let's go," he says and walks over the line, not looking behind him. But MacDonald and Lowell stand still. They do not cross the line with Mailer: It was as if the air had changed, or light had altered; he felt immediately much more alive--yes, bathed in air--and yet disembodied from himself, as if indeed he were watching himself in a film where...
THAT kind of description is one that a writer can only write about himself. I saw Mailer cross that line that Saturday and walk up to an MP and get arrested and I took a picture of him. And I thought, "There is Norman Mailer getting arrested in his three-piece pin-striped suit. What a comfortable feeling it is to see Mailer. He makes everything seem so friendly. There is such solace in respectability." But Mailer, at the very same instant, was not feeling the way I had imagined him: The subject was not absolutely calm...
...journalist, I could only describe Mailer as I saw Mailer. But how relevant or how real is that judgment? What counts is how Mailer saw Mailer, for that is what Mailer really was at that moment as he was being arrested. This is the justification for this kind of personalized journalism. It is the answer to the doubt Mailer expresses in his piece: To write an intimate history of an event which places its focus on a central figure who is not central to the event, is to inspire immediate questions about the competence of the historian...
...Steps of the Pentagon" is a true nonfiction novel. Mailer is eminently a novelist and eminently a journalist--he is remarkably accurate at being both. The combination is a daring achievement. Novak and Evans or Knebel or Galbraith write novels based on contemporary journalistic events, but they are related to their own reality as science fiction is related to science--a fantastic but logical extension of reality. What Mailer achieves is a deep personalization of the event. And his success as a journalist can be attributed to his talent as a novelist. As he writes of himself...