Similar to a writing technique of E.L. Doctorow, Mailer intertwines history and non-fiction in his account of 60s style anti-war protests.

So many don't "get" Mailer as deliberate provocatuer. Nor do they appear to "get" the self-deprecation, even when it is laid out directly in front of their eyes -- as it is at the very beginning of this book with an extended quote from "Time" magazine describing his abominable behavior, in which he is quoted as saying: "I'm here because I'm like LBJ . . . . He's as full of crap as I am."

And he doesn't deny it; in fact, he goes on to verify it, and detail what he was thinking at the time. Reading him correctly in such moments is to discover an uproarious sense of humor -- and a near-constant pullings of others' legs.

And on p. 15 (paperback edition) he writes:

. . . . Like a later generation which was to burn holes in their brain on Speed, [Mailer] had
given his own head the texture of a fine Swiss cheese. Years ago he had made all sorts of
erosions in his intellectual firmament by consuming modestly promiscuous amounts of
whiskey, marijuana, seconal, and benzedrine. It had given him the illusion that he was a
genius . . . .

To be sure to lesser degree than Mark Twain, Mailer often pretends to a huge ego -- he, unlike, Twain, in order to provoke those who believe he has a big ego, and that it is out of control. In other words: he often says exactly the same negative things about himself, albeit in different words, as do his uncomprehending "critics".

To the book itself: though I enjoyed the experiment -- writing two accounts, one factual, the other in the form of a fiction, I would have been satisfied with only one of them. (The tighter of the two is the novelistic.) Otherwise, his reportage is accurate as concerns outward events, and I must assume -- in view of the self-deprecation -- that his reportage as concerns inward events is as least as accurate.

All in all, I much prefer "Miama and the Seige of Chicago" -- it sails from beginning to end -- his speech from the flatbed trailer being especially memorable, and a similar conceit: reporting the words of his speech, as he's giving it, and simultaneously reporting what is going on in his mind at the same time he is giving the speech -- such as his question of himself as to whether he'd done too much speed and marihuana in his life up to that point.

To use one of his favorite terms as provocatuer during the early 1970s: Some people are simply impenetrable, lifelong "Libbies" who will never "get it" because they interpose their ideological presumptions and expectations between themselves and the outer world, especially between themselves and the "horrible chauvanist" Norman Mailer. As result, they need not actually read him, because they know in advance what they believe he is saying. The irony is that they take him more seriously than he takes himself. The irony is that he, unlike his "critics," can admit to being that at which humans most often succeed: an ass.

The first and much the longer part of The Armies of the Night is a chatty story of the antiwar March on Washington in October 1967. Mailer (he’s always Mailer, not “I") feels a mixture of respect, friendship, and jealousy toward the poet Robert Lowell. Mailer decides to be the MC for the evening’s speakers, but has to relieve himself first; he finds the room, but can’t find the lightswitch and misses the urinal. (Those three or four pages got a lot of attention when Armies was first published.) He returns to the stage and makes a fool of himself, as he often did when drunk. He participates in an exorcism led by the Fugs. Finally, he manages to get arrested, and shares an Army truck with a Nazi who had shown up to protest the protesters.

Mailer is bemused by hippies, and very mistrustful of anybody who reminds him of 1950s-style Communists (that includes wide swatches of the middle-class end of the antiwar movement). Most importantly, he observes the conflicts between the middle-class lefties, the religious pacifists, the old-style Left intellectuals, the hippies, the Jerry Rubin coterie, and everybody else who converged on Washington that week.

The narrative is hilarious in places, usually self-indulgent (though it quietly gets less dippy and more serious as the event progresses), and closely observed throughout. I wasn’t there, but from being in and around similar local events, I found Mailer’s narrative credible when I read it in 1968, and forty years later it is every bit as evocative.

The second part is less immediate and more philosophical; and it is unexpectedly coherent. Norman Mailer often described himself as a Left Conservative; he sympathized with the Left in many ways, but had no use for Communists; in fact, his major critique of the American society that could launch the Vietnam War was that it was too technological, too enraptured with “rational thought” -- too much like the Soviet Union. (Oddly for a man who was essentially a New York intellectual, some of his philosophy evokes the Greens.) He also saw too many leftist groups as caught in ideological binds that got in the way of thought; his parsing of the conflicts between the Old and New Lefts is relentless and still holds up as an analysis of thought gone awry, even as little remains of either Left. None of this is to say that he had anything good to say about the military establishment.

I reread it half-expecting to find a period piece that would satisfy a bout of Sixties nostalgia and not do much more. But the scrutiny is so vivid, the emotional currents so finely rendered, and even the political philosophy still fresh, quirky, and fascinating, that it has turned out to be a journalistic classic. ( )

3810. The Armies of the Night History as a Novel The Novel as History, by Norman Mailer (read 6 Oct 2003) This book of nonfiction tells of Mailer's participation in a "march" on the Pentagon on Oct 21, 1967, and won the National Book Award for nonfiction for 1969 and also the Pulitzer prize--which kind of explains why I read it, since I am sort of trying to read all such winners. He tells in great detail of all he did and of being arrested and spending a brief time in jail. The excesses of the marchers were annoying and Mailer's account of his urinating on the floor in a dark hotel restroom and then announcing such in his subsequent speech was simply repulsive. This was not a worthwhile book: maybe I should have read it in 1969 when it had some topicality but I doubt I would have felt it was worth reading even then. ( )