Poetic space program accounts showcase artistic journalism’s value.
[Into the wild blue yonder: the historic Apollo moonshot, 1969.]
[ Why you won’t read his space book but should.]
I say this while immersed in Of a Fire on the Moon, the account of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon in 1969 by a man who fueled that stereotype, legendary egotist Norman Mailer. Reading it because of another book I’m reviewing, I find Mailer’s stance may imply at first blush I’m smarter and feel more, which gives me the right to be this self-referential. But I can’t help but think as well of the burden of such a claim. To be smarter and more empathetic. You can see, too, that he isn’t just winging it—his language and insights reveal he’s deeply immersed. His idiosyncratic impressions of the astronauts are interesting and, let it be said, funny.
Here’s a snippet of his portrayal of Neil Armstrong at a pre-launch press conference in Houston:
When Armstrong paused and looked for the next phrase he sometimes made a sound like the open crackling of static on a pilot’s voiceband with the control tower. One did not have the impression that the static came from him so much as that he had listened to so much static in his life, suffered so much of it, that his flesh, his cells, like it or not, were impregnated with the very cracklings of static.
And I can’t resist quoting from Mailer’s impressions of Buzz Aldrin (who in 2002 at age 72 went viral on YouTube for punching out a moon-landing denier). Here Aldrin painfully tries to address journalists’ appalling prying about his feelings:
He spoke glumly, probably thinking at this moment neither of his family nor himself—rather whether his ability to anticipate and interpret had been correctly employed in the cathexis-loaded dynamic shift vector area of changed field domestic situations (which translates as: attractive wife and kids playing second fiddle to boss astronaut number two sometimes blow group stack). Aldrin was a man of such powerful potentialities and iron disciplines that the dull weight of appropriately massed jargon was no mean gift to him. He obviously liked it to work. It kept explosives in their package. When his laboriously acquired speech failed to mop up the discharge of a question, he got as glum as a fastidious housewife who cannot keep the shine on her floor.
[Oriana Fallaci: brave, blazing talent.]
Mailer had to content himself with attending a press conference with von Braun and later his speech at a Titusville, Florida, country club. Mailer cast lots of shade von Braun’s way, per the wizard’s massive Teutonic chin, small voice, and past affiliation. But Mailer’s animus really stems from his romantic sensibility threatened by and hostile toward technology and technicians. Rocketry: merely emblematic. Technology is why you won’t read Of a Fire on the Moon and why you should. Through the moon mission, Mailer attempts a national portrait.
As a college student, I lost myself in his account of participating in the 1967 antiwar march on the Pentagon, The Armies of the Night, which won a Pulitzer. “Creative nonfiction” didn’t yet exist, and New Journalism was a rumor, but it showed me how a writer could use the self to transcend the self. It showed me personal writing’s power and importance in helping readers understand phenomena by filtering them through an individual’s sensibility. I was amazed again in 1980 by Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, about Gary Gilmore’s life, crimes, and execution. Using Lawrence Schiller’s exhaustive research and interviews, Mailer spun stringently impersonal prose for this “novel,” for which he won his second Pulitzer. If Mailer’s fiction seemed lesser than his contemporaries’ to me, his reality-based narratives were something else. As Charles McGrath wrote in his obituary for the New York Times:
Along the way, he transformed American journalism by introducing to nonfiction writing some of the techniques of the novelist and by placing at the center of his reporting a brilliant, flawed and larger-than-life character who was none other than Norman Mailer himself.
Mailer’s writing in 1970’s Of a Fire on the Moon makes me think it held lessons for Tom Wolfe, who came along with The Right Stuff almost a decade later, in 1979. Maybe it’s just Mailer’s freely used exclamation points. But unlike Wolfe, who wrote his entertaining account in a distanced third person, Mailer, writing of himself in third person, at least doesn’t make everyone bray like jackasses. Wolfe beat the hell out of becoming privy to test pilot’s secret macho code, whereas Mailer—give the devil his due—angled for gravity. He had briefly studied aeronautical engineering when at Harvard, a piquant fact given his avowed anxiety about all that spaceflight represents.
Mailer’s writing ability is so fearsome, reminiscent of David Foster Wallace’s, that you stop questioning the accuracy of his perceptions—what would that mean? subjectivity’s the point— and instead marvel at their nature and quantity. As when he observes Armstrong give a successful TV interview and muses on “that intolerable mixture of bland agreeability and dissolved salt which characterized all performers who appeared in public each day for years and prospered.”
Say what?
Then again, ponder for yourself dissolved salt. Mailer fields startling metaphors. Through it all, our perceptive stand-in strains to master a quintessentially human striving and to convey it. I had written off Mailer because of his behavior, but my project that sent me to his work again showed me how impressive he could be as a writer. Trying in Of a Fire on the Moon to grasp and pull together everything makes his work feel exciting and risky. Traveling the “unmapped continent of America’s undetermined heart,” he conjures America’s intractable demons and its impossible ideals.
[In 2014, on the eve of the 45th anniversary of the moon expedition, Geoff Dyer wrote about Mailer’s book in the Guardian as an exemplar of New Journalism.]
[Below: Apollo 11 atop the humongous Saturn V rocket.]
Great stuff, Richard, but if I’m probably going to just read one of them for a historical account of the era, when I was so engrossed in grad school I didn’t even read a newspaper, would you recommendf Oriana Fallaci’s If the Sun Dies or Mailer’s?
I guess Mailer’s, dclaud. His account occurs at the peak of the space program. Hers is more speculative.
I’ve read Tom Wolfe’s “The Right Stuff” and found it a hoot and a holler, but I think that’s because I grew up in the day when everyone was worshipping the astronauts, and we had to be properly respectful in school, and somehow one always likes later to see the stuffing kicked out of things one was forced to revere, even if one should respect them anyway. The rumor of his chauvinism, both sexual and American, has kept me from reading any Mailer. Maybe it’s time to bite the bullet, eh?
You have nailed Wolfe’s appeal, Victoria! He was cheeky about which we had become overly respectful; he showed the human ways behind the scenes. Which is always what he did.
As for Mailer, as I read Of a Fire on the Moon I recalled my oath more than three decades ago not to read him! Yet his nonfiction speaks to why writing is so hard and to what about it might justify the effort for the writer and earn its audience’s indulgence. He wrote some awful stuff, in all senses of the word, but at its best his work transcended his personal awfulness. Anyway, the incident that caused me to write him off in 1981 occurred much later than this book. So I grandfathered it . . .