Devil Sent the Rain (19 page)

Other People's Houses

M
y house was finally broken into, after fifteen years of waiting for it to happen. It used to happen to other people. Now it has happened to me. Luckily, I own more or less nothing of any value to a thief, except for a handful of small items, which they took. They also managed to ransack the place pretty well. “Trashed” would be the word.

The break-in happened the day before the Katrina anniversary. On that same day, our governor signed an agreement that would allow marshals and bulldozers to come in and seize hundreds of people's homes in lower Mid-City to make room for a hospital complex that could easily be built on a different site.

Yes, I am upset that a thief broke in. But nobody is coming to take a house that I rebuilt with four years of hard labor after the levee failures. The city that I fought to come back to has not decided to summarily wipe away all my hard work and faith. That is happening to other people.

Four years after Katrina, New Orleans is at a crossroads—not just a logistical crossroads, but a moral one, and one might as well say a spiritual one. We are all rightly concerned about crime—violent crime, like the kind that took the lives of Dinerral Shavers and Helen Hill, and nonviolent crime like the house break-ins that might now fairly be called an epidemic.

But there is a different kind of crime about to happen in our city, and in some ways it is more ominous because it travels under the cloak of the law. With a stroke of a pen, an elected official, serving the interests of a cadre of greedy and selfish developers, has just wiped away the hopes, the work, and the dreams not just of a single victim, but of hundreds of hardworking people who trusted and loved this city and worked to rebuild it.

Would I like to get my hands on the thief who broke into my house? You bet. But he (she?) probably lives a wretched existence, sneaking around and stealing. Probably not being very highly rewarded for it either.

The people who will profit from the rape of Mid-City are already well-off. They sit on the boards of LSU and Tulane; they stroll the halls of the State Capitol, City Hall, and the Governor's Mansion. They won't hear the sound of the house they rebuilt being crushed by bulldozers. It will happen to other people.

Charity Hospital sits empty. Most of downtown, for that matter, sits empty. Instead of spreading out into Mid-City, the badly needed medical facilities could be built much more quickly, much less expensively, and much more humanely by updating and using Charity and the surrounding medical district. It would give downtown a badly needed revitalizing mechanism, and it would save people's homes, and it would get medical care to the city more quickly.

Why isn't it being done? Because a handful of greedy bastards want a shiny monument to their own power and ego. It's not about getting health care to the people of New Orleans. It's about money and power.

If you live somewhere else in the city, as I do, you can tell yourself that it's happening to other people. But if we learned one thing from Katrina, it is that we are part of an integrated social and geographical and spiritual ecosystem. We can turn our heads as long as it is going on somewhere else and happening to someone else. Or we can get mad now, and make a stand for human dignity and fairness against greed and power lust.

In his song about the bank robber Pretty Boy Floyd, written seventy years ago, the singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie sang,

He could turn a phrase, that Woody Guthrie. He ended the song thus:

A crime doesn't stop being a crime just because the law is on its side. And Judas Iscariot was paid handsomely by the law for his services. There's still time, but not much, to rescue the soul of this city before the bulldozers crank up.

From the New Orleans
Times-Picayune,
September 5, 2009

Incontinental Drift

A
lready the Captains and Kings have departed, along with their attendant media grandees. It was nice of them to stop by New Orleans for the anniversary and give everybody around the country, and the world, a look from what must seem a comfortable distance.

Just five years ago, water was cascading into the Lower Ninth Ward, into Lakeview, into Gentilly and Mid-City and Broadmoor and St. Bernard. It would take a day or two, but the entire world was about to see what was possible in America, circa 2005.

At first it looked as if New Orleans had been smacked by a hurricane, which, of course, it had. It would take a while longer for people to understand that the images that halted the coffee cup en route to the mouth, or that kept their eyes open and fixed on the news past bedtime, were the result not of a natural disaster, bad as the hurricane was, but of a catastrophic planning and engineering failure on the part of the Army Corps of Engineers. Many still don't realize it. Of course, many also think that Iraq planned the 9/11 attacks.

And then, this summer, BP. It became a mantra: “You poor guys down there . . . First Katrina flooded your city, and now this . . .”

All this spillage. It was getting kind of . . . embarrassing. To be an American, I mean. We had had some dicey moments before Katrina, to be sure. The savings and loan scandal. Then Enron, then WorldCom. They proved relatively easy to contain and, importantly, they offered no searing visual images to disturb the sleep of the republic. By the time Katrina hit, we had been hemorrhaging money, human blood, and credibility in Iraq for two years, but we had a story to cover that: We had been attacked. The mainstream media mostly went along with that particular narrative, even though it had nothing to do with the war in question.

Katrina, however, was different. Katrina exposed something rotten at the root. The federally built levees were weak as a wino's teeth, and the governmental response to their failure was worse than inept. The federal government suddenly, glaringly, resembled a drunk who had all too publicly lost control of his, shall we say, faculties.

Three years later, in 2008, at least partly as a result of the previous losses of financial control, Wall Street and the housing market sheepishly said, “We've had a little accident . . .” and a massive dose of antidiarrheals in the form of endless debt for future generations was required to keep the body politic from draining out completely.

Two years later, another manifestation of the Great Incontinence, an oil well that ruptured and could not stop, millions (billions? who's counting?) of gallons of oil billowing out into some of the most ecologically sensitive waters on the planet. The government stood by, wringing its hands, as BP lunged at a series of ill-considered and untested solutions, one after another, falling repeatedly on their faces like country boys trying to catch a greased pig.

As their veins become less forthcoming, junkies, old-timers who have been shooting for years, are known to look for a place to hit anywhere—between their toes, in their groins. Well, we Americans were famously “addicted” to oil. And with the Deepwater Horizon blowup, the needle had broken off and the earth itself seemed to be bleeding uncontrollably.

It was an image from the darkest wells of the collective psyche, a nightmare. They tell us that dreams exist to bring to light material that we are having trouble facing directly when conscious. What are these bad dreams telling us?

The result of uncontrolled indulgence is, ultimately, a lack of control when you need it most. Americans don't want to hear it. But we're not kids anymore, no matter how hard we try to act like it. There is an incontinence at our center now that is the result of years—decades—of telling ourselves that our destiny was manifest, our entitlement endless. We could spend uncountable amounts of money on a foreign war and offer tax cuts to the wealthy at the same time. We could consume energy without giving it a second thought—after all, we would be dead by the time the account ran dry. We could toss the regulatory chains from the shoulders of the oppressed banking and investment industries—sorry,
industry
. The regulations were, after all, so 1933. We could cut corners on crucial infrastructure projects since the odds were that the levees and bridges and pipelines and dams wouldn't fail anytime soon. As a result we are finding new orifices from which to bleed and drain at an ever-accelerating rate.

How is New Orleans doing? We are doing all right. We have a new mayor, we are strong. But how are you doing? The levee failures, the BP spill, the financial meltdown, all share the same root. Somewhere the nation lost the commonsense understanding that corporations and government agencies can't be expected to regulate themselves. Or perhaps we have only lost the will to act on the understanding.

The levees have been repaired, yes. In the places where they broke. The oil well has, finally, been capped, and all the oil has either evaporated or been eaten by microbes (you believe that?). The too-big-to-fail financial institutions have had their bad gambling debts paid by Big Daddy. Sleep well.

It may be comforting to imagine that Katrina and this year's BP disaster happened “down there,” but from down here they appear to be happening right in the middle of everything. On the day of the anniversary, the president for whom I voted so proudly not even two years ago, spoke in New Orleans, promising, as did his predecessor, a Full Recovery. But on the larger stage he is, dare I say it, pissing away his chance to articulate that oh-so-crucial sense of urgency, summon the necessary will to address a flawed underlying logic, rather than merely cleaning up the mess afterward. I know he doesn't want to be called a socialist. But if we can't figure out a way to grow up, and fast, there will be no diaper in the world big enough for us.

From
The Huffington Post,
August 31, 2010

 

It was my great good fortune to get to know my first literary hero when I was still young enough for it to feel like magic. “Norman Mailer: A Remembrance,” published in the 2008 memorial issue of
The Mailer Review,
tells the story of how I met Norman in 1981; he remained a close friend until his death in 2007. The companion piece here appeared in the
Columbia Journalism Review,
as part of its Second Read series, in which an author revisits a book that was important in his or her development. It makes the case as well as I am able for what I consider to be the heart of Mailer's value as a writer and intellectual.

Citizen Mailer

E
arly in Norman Mailer's
The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History
, the poet Robert Lowell tells Mailer that he thinks of him as “the finest journalist in America.” One writer's compliment is plainly another's backhanded insult. Mailer had a lifelong ambivalence about his reportorial, as opposed to his novelistic, work, considering fiction to be a higher calling. “There are days,” Mailer responds, tartly, “when I think of myself as being the best writer in America.”

A year after Mailer's death in November 2007, at eighty-four, maybe we can begin to be grateful that he worked both sides of the yard. He was always an interesting and ambitious novelist, yet Mailer's loyalties were divided between his fictive imagination and his fascination with the way society works. At his best, the two merged, and the results made for some of the most extraordinary writing of the postwar era.

When Mailer died, commentators lined up to bemoan the dearth of serious writers who, like Mailer, were willing to match their own egos, their own perceptions and sensibilities, against large contemporary events. We suffer from no shortage of gutsy reporters eager to cover trouble spots around the world. But rarely does that kind of journalistic impulse coexist with a personally distinct literary style, an ability to use one's own point of view as an entry into the reality of a subject. For Mailer, that subjectivity was not just a stylistic trait but a kind of ethical tenet, the door into a larger—he would call it novelistic—truth.

Mailer brought this approach to its peak in
The Armies of the Night
. His journalistic mock epic of the 1967 March on the Pentagon first appeared in
Harper's
, occupying the cover and taking up practically the entire issue, and came out in book form in the spring of 1968. By that time, the so-called New Journalism was in full bloom; Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, George Plimpton, Truman Capote, and others had already done significant work, bringing highly individual styles and sensibilities to a form that had stubbornly held to its conventions of objectivity.

The Armies of the Night
stood out from all their work in some important ways. Most New Journalism focused on a subculture—motorcycle gangs, hippies, a football team, Hollywood celebrity—and, by rendering it vividly, attempted to make inductive points about the larger culture. Mailer had a different approach. He got as close as he could to the gears of power and then used his own sensibilities as a set of coordinates by which to measure the dimensions of people and events on the national stage: presidents and astronauts, championship fights and political conventions.

He had shown this predilection before writing
Armies
. There was his
Esquire
article about John F. Kennedy at the 1960 Democratic convention, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” and “In the Red Light,” a piece on the 1964 Republican convention. There was also the audacious interstitial writing, addressed directly to Kennedy, the new president of the United States, in one of his most interesting and neglected books,
The Presidential Papers
. But in
Armies
, Mailer upped the ante by placing himself at the center of the narrative, turning himself into a self-dramatizing (in the purest sense of the phrase) protagonist. He gave his consciousness not just eyes but a face.

The book presents Mailer as a reluctant participant in a mass protest against the Vietnam War that took place in October 1967. A cast of extraordinary characters populates the stage—Robert Lowell, Dwight Macdonald, Paul Goodman, Ed de Grazia—along with a secondary crew of protesters, marshals, homegrown Nazis, police, court bailiffs, and Mailer's fourth wife back in New York. The author also manages to cram a lot of action into the short span of the narrative. He delivers a drunken speech on the eve of the march, attends a party full of liberal academics, consorts with Lowell, Macdonald, William Sloane Coffin Jr., and other notables gathered for the march, participates in the protest itself, gets arrested, and spends the night in jail.

The publication of the first part of the book in
Harper's
created a sensation. A month later, the book's second part, a shorter and more formal account of the planning and execution of the march, was published in
Commentary
. They were combined in the finished volume, to which Mailer appended his subtitle, “History as a Novel, the Novel as History.” It was immediately and almost universally recognized as a “triumph,” to use Dwight Macdonald's word, and went on to win both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

Mailer's most significant discovery in
Armies
was the technique of writing about himself in the third person, as if he were a character in a novel. “Norman Mailer,” the character, is treated as a mock-heroic protagonist making his way through a complex network of competing interests and sensibilities during that weekend in Washington. Because we get a vivid sense of him early on, we gladly accept the topspin he puts on his perceptions as he serves them up.

He earns a powerful narrative leverage, starting with the very first sentence. “From the outset,” he writes, “let us bring you news of your protagonist.” This lone sentence is followed by an extended excerpt from
Time
's snarky report on Mailer's pre-protest monologue at the Ambassador Theater.

It is a shrewd and effective opening gambit. There is a clearly stated “us” and “you,” so an immediate dramatic relation is set up between the narrative voice and the reader. The voice is bringing us “news”—we love news!—and it is about “your” protagonist, drawing us into a subliminal complicity. Within a page we learn that the “us” who is bringing the news is, in fact, our protagonist himself, a man of many parts, apparently, perhaps containing Whitmanesque multitudes.

The
Time
excerpt is studded with value judgments masquerading as straight reporting: The upcoming march is referred to as “Saturday's capers,” and Dwight Macdonald, who shared the stage with Mailer, is “the bearded literary critic.” When the excerpt is done, Mailer quits this curtain-raiser with a single sentence, “Now we may leave
Time
in order to find out what happened.” We are hooked. And we have been introduced to the book's underlying principle: the notion that a reporter who is willing to characterize events without first characterizing himself or herself is inherently suspect. One can't approach the truth without first turning an eye on one's own subjectivity.

The second chapter, the book's official beginning, puts this principle into practice immediately. “On a day somewhat early in September,” the narrative begins, “the year of the first March on the Pentagon, 1967, the phone rang one morning and Norman Mailer, operating on his own principle of war games and random play, picked it up. This was not characteristic of Mailer. Like most people whose nerves are sufficiently sensitive to keep them well-covered with flesh, he detested the telephone. Taken in excess, it drove some psychic equivalent of static into the privacies of the brain.”

Since we know that we are hearing this from Mailer himself, we are, again, complicit in the narrative; a game is in progress, and we are being shown the rules. We are going to get our events via a mind that is nothing if not subjective, and yet paradoxically objective about its own subjectivity. We will get descriptions of action (he picks up the ringing phone), background context for the action (it was not characteristic), observations delivered from an unexpected angle with a Mark-of-Zorro flourish (the oversensitive nerves with their sheathing of flesh), and an insistence on sharp detail in metaphor (the static being driven into “the privacies of the brain”). The author will juggle these ingredients in quick succession, always with huge linguistic gusto.

Mailer's prose obsessively amends its own perceptions, makes parenthetical observations, qualifies, anticipates, demurs, constantly tries to stand outside itself. He was, in fact, a species of performance artist, discovering metaphors en route and mingling them with dazzling audacity. Here he is, riffing on his discomfort at a party thrown by some liberal backers of the march: “The architecture of his personality bore resemblance to some provincial cathedral which warring orders of the church might have designed separately over several centuries. . . . Boldness, attacks of shyness, rude assertion, and circumlocutions tortured as arthritic fingers working at lace, all took their turn with him, and these shuttlings of mood became most pronounced in their resemblance to the banging and shunting of freight cars when he was with liberal academics.” If your sensibilities are ruffled by a mixed metaphor, comic grandiosity, or long sentences, steer clear of Mailer.

Through it all, Mailer is crucially aware not just of his own motivations, but of how they might play to the public. “Mailer,” he writes, “had the most developed sense of image; if not, he would have been a figure of deficiency, for people had been regarding him by his public image since he was twenty-five years old. He had, in fact, learned to live in the sarcophagus of his image—at night, in his sleep, he might dart out, and paint improvements on the sarcophagus. During the day, while he was helpless, newspapermen and other assorted bravos of the media and literary world would carve ugly pictures on the living tomb of his legend.”

One would be tempted to find a new name for this point of view—“first person third,” perhaps—and think of it as a technical innovation, but for two facts. Mailer winks at the first of these facts upon awakening in his hotel, the Hay-Adams, on the morning of the march, then never mentions it again. “One may wonder,” he writes, “if the Adams in the name of his hotel bore any relation to Henry.” Yes, one may, but nobody need wonder afterward where Mailer got the idea of writing about himself in the third person. By alluding to the author of
The Education of Henry Adams
, Mailer tips his hat, and his hand, to his fellow Harvard alumnus and consummate insider/outsider. The
Education
, published in 1918, may lack Mailer's bravado and sheer joy in language, but it does use the same first-person-third technique to locate its author in an ambiguous social and historical position. (Adams's book, by the way, also won a Pulitzer, presented posthumously in 1919.)

The other fact is that innovations, if they are indeed innovations, usually spawn techniques useful to succeeding practitioners of the form. But the technique of
The Armies of the Night
is so completely suffused with Mailer's personality, his peculiar mix of ego and charm, of self-regard and self-deprecation, his intelligence and occasional clumsiness, that subsequent attempts by other writers to use the first person third have inevitably read as embarrassing, inadvertent homages.

Mailer recognized early on, before a lot of writers, that politics—most of contemporary public life, in fact—was turning into a kind of theater. Actions on the political stage had a symbolic weight that often outbalanced what might previously have been thought of as their practical consequences. This development was the wedge that eventually drove an unbridgeable divide between the Old Left, with its programmatic preoccupations and endless appetite for dogma, and the New Left, with its vivid sense of the theatrical. It was also the subtext of the 1967 march. The real dynamics of public life were shifting away from the old tabulations of political give-and-take. Instead, the cut of a candidate's suit, or the unfortunate presence of his five o'clock shadow, would travel out over the television sets of the nation and affect people's perceptions on a level that bypassed any substantial argument.

The media, to use Mailer's terminology, was driving public events deeper and deeper into the “privacies” of every citizen's brain, short-circuiting linear thinking in favor of image-driven manipulation. And this was precisely why traditional reportage had become ill-equipped for locating the truth of “what happened.” What we needed, insisted Mailer, was a different approach: “The novel must replace history at precisely that point where experience is sufficiently emotional, spiritual, psychical, moral, existential, or supernatural to expose the fact that the historian in pursuing the experience would be obliged to quit the clearly demarcated limits of historic inquiry.”

Needless to say, this development dovetailed perfectly with Mailer's own impulses. And yet (and this is perhaps Mailer's most important saving grace), he was deeply ambivalent about it. Highly sensitive to the theater of events and personae, Mailer was alive to the ways in which the manipulation of surfaces could, and would, be used to deaden the public's ability to think, to sift and evaluate information. Writers, public officials, advertising people, politicians, speechwriters—all were in possession of a dangerous weapon, and they were obliged to use it with singular care. “Style,” Mailer wrote, much later, in an introduction to a book by former SDS member Carl Oglesby about the JFK assassination, “is not the servant of our desire to inform others how to think, but the precise instrument by which we attempt to locate the truth.”

In the light of today's endemic spin, such a sentiment would seem a touching artifact of a simpler time, if it weren't so achievable by any individual sitting alone in a room trying to locate the truth. The prerequisite is the sense that it is both possible and desirable. Citizen Mailer turns the act of seeing, the workings of consciousness itself, into the ultimate civic act—a responsibility shared by everyone in the privacies of his or her brain. There is something profoundly democratic in his insistence that the individual's sensibility could meet the largest events on equal terms, with one's own centering and irreducible humanity as the common denominator.

As a writer and as a man, Mailer was always in a state of tension. His mind and heart were planted in a wholly American flux—improvisatory, protean, deeply ambiguous in intention, supremely egotistical and supremely civic-minded. These tensions give his work its deepest dynamism, turning it into a theater of opposing psychic forces. At the same time, Mailer was not quite a wholly American spirit. Or say that his Americanness existed in extraordinary tension with his respect for European intellectual and artistic traditions. When, toward the end of
Advertisements for Myself
, he promises to write a novel worthy of being read by “Dostoevsky and Marx; Joyce and Freud; Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust and Spengler; Faulkner, and even old moldering Hemingway,” 80 percent of the honor roll has been read before an American is mentioned.