Rav Casley Gera’s Blog

I’m not going to mock Norman Mailer by pretending I can write anything sufficiently meaningful, passionate or truthful to do him justice. Suffice to say that reading his books, I realised for the first time I could care as much about American literature as deeply as I did about American popular culture.

If you fancy a bit of bathos, you can read my cackhanded attempts to mimic the style of The Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago. But far better, I think, to enjoy a slice of the original. The below - scanned in, so apologies for any errors I’ve missed - comes from Mailer’s depiction of the astonishing events in and surrounding the Democratic Convention of 1968, when police employed what one Democratic delegate called “gestapo tactics” against anti-war protesters in the streets (Chicago’s mayor, corrupt Democratic machine politician par excellence - and the father of its current mayor - responded by loudly suggesting to said delegate, across the convention floor and visibly on television, that he should fuck himself). Here Mailer describes the last night of the convention.

*

Shortly after convening, the convention showed a movie thirty-two minutes long, entitled ‘Robert Kennedy Remem­bered’, and while it went on, through the hall, over the floor, and out across the country on television, a kind of unity came over everyone who was watching, at least for a little while. Idealism rarely moved politicians - it had too little to do with property. But emotion did. It was closer to the land. Somewhere between sorrow and the blind sword of patriotism was the fulcrum of reasonable politics, and as the film progressed, and one saw scene after scene of Bobby Kennedy growing older, a kind of happi­ness came back from the image, for something in his face grew young over the years - he looked more like a boy on the day of his death, a nice boy, nicer than the kid with the sharp rocky glint in his eye who had gone to work for Joe McCarthy in his early twenties, and had then known everything there was to know about getting ahead in politics. He had grown modest as he grew older, and his wit had grown with him - he had become a funny man as the picture took care to show, wry, simple for one instant, shy and off to the side on the next, but with a sort of marvelous boy’s wisdom, as if he knew the world was very bad and knew the intimate style of how it was bad, as only boys can sometimes know (for they feel it in their parents and their schoolteachers and their friends). Yet he had confidence he was going to fix it - the picture had this sweet simple view of him which no one could resent for somehow it was not untrue. Since his brother’s death, a subtle sadness had come to live in his tone of confidence, as though he were confident he would win - if he did not lose. That could also happen, and that could happen quickly. He had come into that world where people live with the recognition of tragedy, and so are often afraid of happiness, for they know that one is never in so much danger as when victorious and/or happy - that is when the devils seem to have their hour, and hawks seize some­thing living from the gambol on the field.

The reporter met Bobby Kennedy just once. It was on an afternoon in May in New York just after his victory in the Indiana primary and it had not been a famous meeting, even if it began well. The Senator came in from a conference (for the reporter was being granted an audience) and said quickly with a grin, ‘Mr Mailer, you’re a mean man with a word.’ He had answered, ‘On the contrary, Senator, I like to think of myself as a gracious writer.’

‘Oh,’ said Senator Kennedy, with a wave of his hand, ‘that too, that too!’

So it had begun well enough, and the reporter had been taken with Kennedy’s appearance. He was slimmer even than one would have thought, not strong, not weak, somewhere between a blade of grass and a blade of steel, fine, finely drawn, finely honed, a fine flush of color in his cheeks, two very white front teeth, prominent as the two upper teeth of a rabbit, so his mouth had no hint of the cruelty or calculation of a politician who weighs counties, cities, and states, but was rather a mouth ready to nip at anything which attracted its contempt or endangered its ideas. Then there were his eyes. They were most unusual. His brother Teddy Kennedy spoke of those who ‘followed him, honored him, lived in his mild and magnificent eyes’, and that was fair description for he had very large blue eyes, the iris wide in diameter, near to twice the width of the average eye, and the blue was a milky blue like a marble so that his eyes, while promin­ent, did not show the separate steps and slopes of light some bright eyes show, but rather were gentle, indeed beautiful - one was tempted to speak of velvety eyes - their surface seemed made of velvet as if one could touch them, and the surface would not be repelled.

He was as attractive as a movie star. Not attractive like his brother had been, for Jack Kennedy had looked like the sort of vital leading man who would steal the girl from Ronald Reagan every time, no, Bobbie Kennedy had looked more like a pheno­menon of a movie star - he could have filled some magical empty space between Mickey Rooney and James Dean, they would have cast him sooner or later in some remake of Mr Smith Goes to Washington, and everyone would have said, ‘Impossible casting! He’s too young.’ And he was too young. Too young for Senator, too young for President, it felt strange in his presence thinking of him as President, as if the country would be giddy, like the whirl of one’s stomach in the drop of an elevator or jokes about an adolescent falling in love, it was incredible to think of him as President, and yet marvelous, as if only a marvelous country would finally dare to have him.

That was the best of the meeting - meeting him! The reporter spent the rest of his valuable thirty minutes arguing with the Senator about Senator McCarthy. He begged him to arrange some sort of truce or liaison, but made a large mistake from the outset. He went on in a fatuous voice, sensing error too late to pull back, about how effective two Irish Catholics would be on the same ticket for if there were conservative Irishmen who could vote against one of them, where was the Irish Catholic in America who could vote against two? and Kennedy had looked at him with disgust, as if offended by the presumption in this calcula­tion, his upper lip had come down severely over his two front white teeth, and he had snapped, ‘I don’t want those votes.’ How indeed did the reporter presume to tell him stories about the benightedness of such people when he knew them only too well. So the joke had been a lame joke and worse, and they got into a dull argument about McCarthy, Kennedy having little which was good to say, and the reporter arguing doggedly in the face of such remarks as: ^cHe doesn’t even begin to campaign until twelve.’

They got nowhere. Kennedy’s mind was altogether political on this afternoon. It did not deal with ideas except insofar as ideas were attached to the name of bills, or speeches, or platforms, or specific debates in specific places, and the reporter, always hard put to remember such details, was forced therefore to hammer harder and harder on the virtues of McCarthy’s gamble in enter­ing the New Hampshire primary until Kennedy said, ‘I wonder why you don’t support Senator McCarthy. He seems more like your sort of guy, Mr Mailer,’ and in answer, oddly moved, he had said in a husky voice, ‘No, I’m supporting you. I know it wasn’t easy for you to go in.’ And even began to mutter a few remarks about how he understood that powerful politicians would not have trusted Kennedy if he had moved too quickly, for his holding was large, and men with large holdings were not sup­portable if they leaped too soon. ‘I know that,’ he said looking into the Senator’s mild and magnificent eye, and Kennedy nodded, and in return a little later Kennedy sighed, and exhaled his breath, looked sad for an instant, and said, ‘Who knows? Who knows? perhaps I should have gone in earlier.’ A few minutes later they said good-bye, not unpleasantly. That was the last he saw of him.

The closest he was to come again was to stand in vigil for fifteen minutes as a member of the honor guard about his coffin in St Patrick’s. Lines filed by. People had waited in line for hours, five hours, six hours, more, inching forward through the day and through the police lines on the street in order to take one last look at the closed coffin.

The poorest part of the working class of New York had turned out, poor Negro men and women, Puerto Ricans, Irish washer­women, old Jewish ladies who looked like they ran grubby little newsstands, children, adolescents, families, men with hands thick and lined and horny as oyster shells, calluses like barnacles, came filing by to bob a look at that coffin covered by a flag. Some women walked by praying, and knelt and touched the coffin with their fingertips as they passed, and after a time the flag would slip from the pressure of their fingers and an usher detailed for the purpose would readjust it. The straightest line between two points is the truth of an event, no matter how long it takes or far it winds, and if it had taken these poor people six hours of waiting in line to reach that coffin, then the truth was in the hours. A river of workingclass people came down to march past Kennedy’s coffin, and this endless line of people had really loved him, loved Bobby Kennedy like no political figure in years had been loved.

The organ played somewhere in the nave and the line moved forward under the vast - this day - tragic vaults of the cathedral so high overhead and he felt love for the figure in the coffin and tragedy for the nation in the years ahead, the future of the nature seemed as dark and tortured, as wrenched out of shape, as the contorted blood-spattered painted sculpture of that garish Christ one could find in every dark little Mexican church. The horror of dried blood was now part of the air, and became part Of the air of the funeral next day. That funeral was not nearly so beautiful; the poor people who had waited in line on Friday were now gone, and the mighty were in their place, the President and members of the Congress, and the Establishment, and the Secret Service, and the power of Wall Street; the inside of St Patrick’s for the length of the service was dank with the breath of the over-ambitious offering reverence - there is no gloom so deep unless it is the scent of the upholstery in a mortician’s limousine, or the smell of morning in a closed Pullman after executives have talked through the night.

The movie came to an end. Even dead, and on film, he was better and more moving than anything which had happened in their convention, and people were crying. An ovation began. Delegates came to their feet, and applauded an empty screen - it was as if the center of American life was now passing the age where it could still look forward; now people looked back into memory, into the past of the nation - was that possible? They applauded the presence of a memory. Bobby Kennedy had now become a beloved property of the party.

Minutes went by and the ovation continued. People stood on their chairs and clapped their hands. Cries broke out. Signs were lifted. Small hand-lettered signs which said, ‘Bobby, Be With Us’, and one enormous sign eight feet high, sorrowful as rue in the throat -’Bobby, We Miss You,’ it said.

Now the ovation had gone on long enough - for certain people. So signals went back and forth between floor and podium and phone, and Carl Albert stepped forward and banged the gavel for the ovation to end, and asked for order. The party which had come together for five minutes, after five days and five months and five years of festering discord, was now immediately divided again. The New York and California delegations began to sing the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’, and the floor heard, and delegations everywhere began to sing. Humphrey delegations as quick as the rest. In every convention there is a steamroller, and a moment when the flattened exhale their steam, and ‘Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!’ was the cry of the oppressed at this convention, even those unwittingly oppressed in their mind, and not even knowing it in their heart until this instant, now they were defying the Chair, clapping their hands, singing, stamping their feet to mock the chairman’s gavel.

Carl Albert brought up Dorothy Bush to read an appreciation the convention would offer for the work of certain delegates. The convention did not wish to hear. Mrs Bush began to read in a thin mean voice, quivering with the hatreds of an occasion like this, and the crowd sang on, ‘Glory, Glory, Hallelujah, his truth goes marching on,’ and they stamped their feet and clapped their hands, and were loose finally and having their day as they sang the song which once, originally, had commemorated a man who preached civil disorder, then mutiny, and attacked a fort in his madness and was killed, John Brown was also being celebrated here, and the Texas and Illinois delegations were now silent, clapping no longer, sitting on their seats, looking bored. Every delegate on the floor who had hated the Kennedys was now look­ing bored, and the ones who had loved them were now noisier than ever. Once again the party was polarized. Signs waved all over the floor, ‘Bobby, We’ll Remember you’, ‘Bobby, We’ll Seek Your Newer World’, and the ever-present, ‘Bobby, We Miss You’. Yes they did, missed him as the loving spirit, the tender germ in the living plasma of the party. Nothing was going to make them stop; this offering of applause in the oratorical vitamin pills Hubert would yet be there to offer. The demonstration went on for twenty minutes and gave no sign of stopping at all. Dorothy Bush had long ago given up. Carl Albert, even smaller than Georgie Wallace, was now as furious as only a tiny man can be when his hard earned authority has turned to wax -he glared across the floor at the New York delegation like a little boy who smells something bad.

However did they stop the demonstration? Well, convention mechanics can be as perfect as the muscle in a good play when professionals have worked their football for a season. Mayor Daley, old lover of the Kennedys, and politically still enough of an enigma six months ago for Bobby to have said in his bloodwise political wisdom, ‘Daley is the ballgame,’ Mayor Daley, still (lining with the Kennedys these last three days in his desire for Teddy as Vice President, now had come to the end of his political string, and like a good politician he pulled it. He gave the signal. The gallery began to chant, ‘We love Daley.’ All his goons and clerks and beef-eaters and healthy parochial school students began to yell and scream and clap, ‘We love Daley’, and the power of their lungs, the power of the freshest and the largest force in this Amphitheatre soon drowned out the Kennedy demonstrators, stuffed their larynxes with larger sound. The Daley demonstration was bona fide too - his people had suffered with their Mayor, so they screamed for him now and clapped their hands, and Mayor Daley clapped his hands too for he also loved Mayor Daley. Simple narcissism gives the power of beasts to politicians, professional wrestlers and female movie stars.

At the height of the Daley demonstration, it was abruptly cut off. By a signal. ‘Shut your yaps’ was an old button, no matter how the signal came. In the momentary silence, Carl Albert got his tongue in, and put Ralph Metcalfe (Daley’s Black man) who was up on the podium already, into voice on the mike, and Met­calfe announced five minutes of silence for the memory of Martin Luther King. So New York and California were naturally obliged to be silent with the rest, the floor was silent, the gallery was silent, and before those minutes began to be up, Carl Albert had slipped Dorothy Rush in again, and she was reading the appre­ciation of the convention for certain delegates. Business had been resumed. The last night proceeded.