VISIONS OF THE PENTAGON MARCH

 

     This talk concerns Lowell's March poems and Mailer's Armies of the Night.  Given the prominent focus on the self in both writers,  the fact that these works are widely taken to be important documents about the Pentagon March of October, 1967, requires some explanation.  The intense American tradition of the poetics and the politics of the self has consis­tently troubled Europeans, especially the extreme forms it adopted in the 60's and 70's.  The problematic American identity is based in its struggle with an unclear, divided, ambiguous and often deeply ironic attachment to class, ethnic culture, race, education, intellectual tradition, and it is complicated as well by the widespread acceptance of Freud's view of the self as inherently divided against itself.  The native pragmatism, empiricism and

pluralism (which is nearly instinc­tive--86 percent of Americans have no objection to cre­ationism being taught alongside of evolution) can leave one, in reaction, hungry for certainty, unity, moral clarity, and for a reliable myth of the cosmos and the state, which can be supplied by ideologues of the Left, the Right, Globalists and Small World Anarchists, and by Freud's apocalyptic disciples like Reich, Norman O. Brown and Marcuse, who were especially popular in the 60's, along with a vague utopianism that was part Brook Farm and Part Marx.  And the alternation between the American uncertain­ties and the American demand for order--this vacilla­tion-- must be under­stood as a primary ordering impulse in its art in the 20th century: "the imperfect is our paradise" along with "this blessed rage for order."

     In an interview with Lowell, at the point when it became fully a conversation between two remarkable writers, Naipaul says:  "I...feel, particularly after reading Mailer, that what looked like concern wasn't really concern but somehow seemed to come out of boredom, a sense that life is going nowhere.  To have a cause was a form of intellectual self-cher­ishing."  With his marvelous stranger-here-and-everywhere insight, Naipaul sees the egotism clearly in Mailer, but resists seeing this as an American trope, or American mode of political experience and concern.

     Yet the self centered accounts of the Pentagon march by both Mailer and Lowell seem to polarize into a study of contrasting temperaments: the private man and the public man.  The opposition seems neat and both men throw them­selves into these roles, but in fact despite the opposition they come together at many points, and it is the connections between them that matter most.  They are unified, to begin with, by the feminist slogan of the 60's that expresses the rebellious political ethos of the two decades: "the personal is the politi­cal."  The refusal to accept the classical dichotomy between these seemingly opposed realms is rooted in early American thought, in Jeffer­son and Madison's emphasis on an educated electorate on the one hand ("Education is the true foundation of civil liberty" was engraved over the door of my High School, named after James Madison) and a line of thought in Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman that we find expressed with modesty and restraint by T.S. Eliot in "Little Gidding"

                   ...love of a country

     Begins as attachment to our own field of action

     And comes to find that action later of little importance

     Though never indifferent.

The Vietnam war and the political and theoretical objection to it are very much in the background in both Armies of the Night and the March poems.  Both works concern themselves with a grim vision of the murderous culture and the monolithic state and with their own struggles with it, and while very different, their visions are never­theless both are portrayed as struggles for the soul of America.  The con­trast between the personal styles of the two accounts is extreme and Mailer and Lowell were aware of it, playing off against one another:  on the one hand, Mailer is the public man, the ham, the performer, the swaggerer, a bully spoiling for a fight, and on the other Lowell sees himself, and is seen, as the withdrawn man impelled by conscience from his retreat within an austere private life into political action.

     Lowell's two poems, The March 1 and 2, are unrhymed and unmetered with fourteen lines which suggest iambic pentameter with their five stresses (mostly).  The fourteen lines evoke the formal structure of the sonnet, which provid­es a kind of rhetori­cal frame and clo­sure.  They appear first in Notebook 1967-68 and then in Notebook and again unchanged in History in 1973, 4 years after their first appearance.  In both Notebook versions they are part of a group of poems dealing with totali­tarian violence and heroic sacrifice: the death of Che Guevarra;  Lowell's remarkably heroic ancestor Charles Russell Lowell-- killed after being strapped to his horse, when wounded, to lead a charge in the Wilderness battle of the Civil War; and with a visit to the bloody and exploit­ative "pioneer democracy" in Caracas.  The March poems are removed from this tight cluster in their final appearance in History, in order, no doubt, to remove the possi­bility of a heavy handed ironic con­trast with their moral hesi­tance.

     These two poems are tightly linked but kept separate to preserve the formal organiza­tion of the book and to emphasize the rhetorical closure of the separate parts.  The March 1, dedicated to Dwight Macdonald, with whom Lowell was sitting, begins with a vision of the gigantism of the state, which is not horrifying at this point but tasteless and ludicrous.  Lowell's playful repeti­tions and internal triple rhymes provide the wry, comic tone:

     Under the too white marmoreal Lincoln Memorial,

     the too tall marmoreal Washington Obelisk,

     gazing into the too long reflecting pool,

and then a turn to Thomas Hardy's landscape, with one of the signature Hardy words that Lowell appropriated often through his

pessimistic late poems--"withering"

     the reddish trees, the withering autumn sky,

and then self-mockingly, because they are his speakers haranguing and his locked arms and quaking fingers

     the remorseless, amplified harangues for peace--

     lovely to lock arms and march absurdly locked

     (unlocking to keep my wet glasses from slipping)

     to see the cigarette match quaking in my fingers,

At the end of the octave the irony is directed entirely on himself and his colleagues in the march. Then the poem turns in the sestet, as sonnets are wont to do, but the horror of its new direction can be masked by the wry, satiric tone.

     then to step off like green Union Army recruits

     for the first Bull Run, sped by photographers,

     the notables, the girls...fear, glory, chaos rout...

     our green army staggered out on the miles-long green fields,

     met by the other army, the Martian, the ape, the hero,

     his new-fangled rifle, his green new steel helmet.

(It should be noted that my interpolated comments disguise the fact that this poem consists of a single sentence.)  The first battle of Bull Run was a disaster for the Union army, like the first day of the Somme, an unsuspecting, confident charge into heavily armed en­trenched positions, and the losses were horrific.  But its menace is disguised here, by being decked out as the inva­sion of Lebanon during the Suez Crisis of October '56, exactly 11 years before, with the press photogra­phers in the vanguard, backing on to the beach in the absence of an enemy, with cameras rolling--and the army not heroic but looking fool­ish.  In the last two lines they encounter at last the alien police state, even alien to itself, with its new weapons and helmets. (Inci­dentally, the rifles were kept unload­ed, though later that night they were used as clubs by a guard picked from angry Vietnam combat veterans who violated the agreements that were made between the Pentagon officials and the demonstrators and who were simply eager to beat up the rich kids, particu­larly the women.) 

     The emphasis on the absurdity of the situation of the protesters and of the state prepares us for our encounter with fear, terror of the state and escape in The March 2.  The action of the poem begins after the "notable" protesters, led by the march organiz­er, Dave Dellinger, all committed civil disobedience by assembling in a forbidden area.  After the speeches, soldiers approached and they sat down.  Dellinger and Dagmar Wilson, head of Womens Strike for Peace, and Noam Chomsky were arrested.  The venerable Dr. Spock and his wife tried and failed to get arrest­ed.  Lowell and Macdonald were ignored and finally went home.  Mailer suspects that the U.S. Marshalls had decided beforehand whom to arrest and whom to ignore.  Chomsky, while not an orga­niz­er like Dellinger and Wilson, looked like a young smart-guy trouble­maker.

     The March 2 begins with a comic vision of the old folks as battlers for right:

     Where two or three were flung together, or fifty,

     mostly white haired, or bald, or women...sadly

     unfit to follow their dream, I sat in the sunset

     shade of our Bastille, the Pentagon,

     nursing leg- and arch-cramps, my cowardly,

     foolhardy heart; and heard, alas, more speeches,

     though the words took heart now to show how weak

     we were, and right.

The painful self-mockery and sense of absurdity are centered around the awareness of authoritarian force, the Bastille-Penta­gon, and the fifty-year-old's frailty is turned into the citizen's weakness before the state, and of right quailing before might.  And then the state moves, at first surprisingly gently and then to complete an encirclement, harshly, but to the "nota­bles,"  politely.

                             An MP sergeant kept

     repeating, "March slowly through them.  Don't even brush

     anyone sitting down."  They tiptoed through us

     in single file, and then their second wave

     trampled us flat and back.  Health to those who held,

     health to the green steel head...to your kind hands

     that helped me stagger to my feet, and flee.

The emphasis on the fearful token opposition to the force of the state, and its kindness of its alien soldier in helping him to his feet, staggering, mitigates its terror, and leaves Vietnam out of the picture.  The menace is mightily softened in a por­trait of Lowell's weakness, in his self-irony and mockery.  And yet it is there, in the distant background, way behind the "amplified harangues" and even "more speeches" is Lowell's judgement that the speeches, the march, the demonstrators, are right, even though he does not say what they are right about.  It is portrayed only an opposition to a general menace, the Penta­gon-Bastille, the authoritarian state that in the end rescues him rather than beats him.  It is clear that the subject of the poem is not denunciation of power and opposition to a brutal and unnecessary war, which was the purpose of the march itself, but the weakness and laughable absurdity of the individu­al when he faces the state.  He can't even get himself arrested.  The green helmet's hands do not beat him but help him to his feet to flee.

     These sonnets are anti-Miltonic.  The strenuous Petrarchan structure, the impersonal and formal oratorical mode ("Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints whose bones/ Lie scattered ...") are lacking.  Yet the poem is not non-political or a-political.  It refuses to be a sermon or diatribe, but instead is in the Quaker tradition of bearing wit­ness, honestly, against an enemy, a witness that acknowledges the helpless­ness and tokenism and futili­ty of symbolic action against a political order that disdains to kill you as a sign of the arrogance of its power.  Not a simple political position but indeed a clear eyed political vision of the honest experience of protest, which seems all the more genuine for its refusal to inflate its nobility. 

     Though even more relentlessly centered on the self, Armies of the Night is also political--more conventionally so than the March poems.  The book falls in two parts, both mixed forms: the first, "History as a Novel," is a novelistic account of Mailer's adventures during the march (written in the third person), and the second, "The Novel as History," is an historical account of the march, with a novelistic description of the encoun­ters between protestors and police.  While the parts are distinct in method, they are inter­woven, with acute and extensive factual reportage conveyed by Mailer's personal account of himself in the first part.  In the second part, the report of the preparations for the march is a scrupulous historical account, praised by those concerned for having gotten it right.  The method of the book is that of the "new journalism" of the 60's and 70's that attacked the idea that reportorial objectivity was possible, and tried to convey, as the basis of honest method, the true stand­point of the writer--his ideas, his charac­ter and his personali­ty as they bear on what he sees and reports.

     Mailer's candor about himself is startling, as he deals with his competitiveness, hunger for publicity, jealousies and resent­ments, without dignifying them.  He has no hesitance about ex­press­ing the hostile and petty feelings that he nurses and acts on and is seldom ashamed of.  This sentence gives an idea of his tone and manner:

...he had been born into a modest family and had been a modest boy, a modest young man, and he hated that, he loved the pride and arrogance and confidence and egocentricity he had acquired over the years, that was his force and his luxury and the iron in his greed, the richest sugar of his pleasure, the strength of his competitive force, he had lived long enough to know that the intimation one was steeped in a new physical condition (like this oncoming modest grace) was never to be disregarded, permanent new states could come into one on just so light a breeze.

A characteristic ease in acknowledging feelings that are diffi­cult normally to accept, and a shrewd awareness of nuances of shifting feelings are conveyed with a playful, hyperextended syntax and an arch, ironic tone.

     Like Lowell, he gives a truth­ful account of his feelings about the march and Mailer writes from the vantage point of a believable utter candor about his attempts--often laughably futile--to manipulate his image in the media, about his ambiva­lent feelings about the symbolic action of the march--its mock-heroic useless­ness and the self-indulgence, and the sexual ethos and drug use of the middle class kids engaged in the protest.  Unlike Lowell's poems, Armies of the Night describes Mailer's moral and political revulsion with the course of what he consid­ered a bad war in every respect.

     He did not see all wars as bad.  He could conceive of wars

which might be noble...it was a bad war, as all wars are bad if they consist of rich boys fighting poor boys when the rich boys have an advantage in the weapons....Next to every pound of supplies the North Vietnamese brought into South Vietnam for their soldiers, the Americans brought in a thousand pounds...All wars were bad which undertook daily operations which burned and bombed large numbers of women and children; all wars were bad which relocated popula­tions...certainly all wars were bad which took some of the bravest young men of a nation and sent them into combat with outrageous superiority and outrageous arguments: such condi­tions of combat had to excite a secret passion for hunting other humans.  Certainly any war was a bad war which re­quired an inability to reason as the price of retaining one's patriotism...A good war, like anything else which is good, offers the possibility that further effort will pro­duce a determinable effect upon chaos, evil or waste.

His solution was the same as that proposed by Sen. George Aiken, Republi­can of Vermont, and is what the nation finally did 5 years later:  "The root in this case was the welfare of the nation, not the welfare of the war...pull out of Vietnam com­pletely.  Leave Asia to the Asians."

     He was not simply firing from the hip in this passage:  it

is the conclusion of a chapter of thoughtful analysis of the

argu­ments of the hawks and the doves.  It expresses the fundamen­tal moral revulsion with the war that animated most of the marchers, except for those pacifists like David Dellinger who believed there was no possible good war. 

     In both Lowell and Mailer we have a restless hunger to judge American civilization by a coherent standard alongside of a complex plural­ism that makes it impossible to do so.  Lurking behind the thinking of both is a nostalgia for Eliot's arguments for the superiority of Dante to Shakespeare based on the coher­ence of the moral order that Dante invokes.  In both cases, we have foxes, like Isaiah Berlin's Tolstoy, longing to be hedge­hogs, and in their case it is a futile longing.

     They interest­ed one another.  A very flattering idealized por­trait of Lowell in Armies provides Mailer's main foil for himself.  Lowell is many vital things that he is not: austere, dignified, reserved, a member of the WASP estab­lishment and in very fundamental way deeply respectable and revered as a serious artist.    What connects them, in Mailer's eye, is that he is America's best novelist and Lowell is the best poet and Macdonald is the best critic.  These "bests" are vital to an egotism that Mailer will occasionally present as fragile.  When he sees Lowell talking to someone, he thinks that he looks like a Harvard Dean speaking intimately to a friend and then he adds, no Harvard Dean ever spoke to him that way.  This pathos has its comic side, since Mailer was a popular and respected student at Harvard, of whom great things were expect­ed.  But he is letting us know what he felt about being one of the rare Jews at Harvard in the 40's.  Against Mailer's ambitions and hunger for publicity, Lowell proceeds through the first half of the book, "History as a Novel," as an ironic counterpoise to Mailer's judgement of his own egregious character.  But Mailer saw the Lowell he needed to see for his purposes in the book.  The real Robert Lowell was in fact, in those days, strug­gling with the impact of lithium carbonate therapy, which is very severe, and which had, that year and the few following it, kept off the recurrent manic episodes that had plagued his life.  Lowell was not a Harvard Dean but a Harvard dropout and not a model of reserve but instead a model of heroic struggle against the appalling force of a devastating mental illness intensified by alcoholism.  One thinks, as a parallel, of the last years in which Nijinsky could manage to dance before he was finally overwhelmed by schizophrenia.

     Lowell was very flattered by the portrait in Armies but recognized its difficulties.  He said, in an interview with Ian Hamilton, that he reprints in his Collected Prose:  "...he didn't know me very well.  I think maybe the form of the book comes from contrasting me symbolically with himself.  The picture of me...well it isn't quite true.  I am made more goy, more New England, aristocratical and various things, a Quixote in the retinue of Sancho Panza."  What a stunningly accurate character­ization!  Then he goes on to say, despite this:  "I think it is the best, almost the only thing  written about me as a living person."  The poignancy of Lowell, trying to think well of himself at a point in his life when he was testing the patience and loyalty of his friends to the stretching point with his illness is balanced by the comedy in the use of the word "goy."  It reminds us that Lowell had found a position for himself comfortably inside of the Jewish literary culture of New York, from the world of the  Partisan Review to that of the  New York Review of Books,  that had been denied to the Jewish Mailer.  It was an irony that was not lost on Mailer.

 

Barry Goldensohn

Skidmore College