Living Out the Sixties

From a post-millenial perspective, the big thing about the Sixties is not the good they accomplished but the reaction they appear to have induced. No other decade in the twentieth century carries such symbolic weight. One's politics can be measured by one's take on that time. The divide between the red and the blue states has largely to do with this: The Sixties gave Americans an unprecedented access of power in relation to the world; or, the Sixties opened the gates of excess and misrule. A positive take on the decade might invoke the rise of the women's movement, environmentalism, gay liberation, the rights of the handicapped. A negative view recalls the rise of drug abuse, the breakdown of the public schools, the spread of pornography, the culture of divorce. Vietnam and one's response to it remains the touchstone, the iceberg that still cruises through our dreams. There is no question that because of that time Americans became more free. There is little question as well that many of them also became more lost.

The decade of the Sixties was singularly rich in visionary sociology, books like Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man, Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd, R. D. Laing's The Politics of Experience, and Norman O. Brown's Love's Body. The literature of race and civil rights continued to make its story heard, with contributions from James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Eldridge Cleaver, Martin Luther King, and Alice Walker. Vonnegut publishes Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969, while, four years later, Pynchon gives us what may be the great novel of the Sixties sensibility in Gravity's Rainbow. Ariel is published in 1965, as radical a book of poetry as the period was to afford. Bishop's poetic career runs athwart the decade, while giving little direct attention to it. Michael Herr begins sending his "dispatches" to Esquire in 1968, but waits to gather them into the supreme book on the Vietnam experience until 1977. All this and more belongs in any full account of the Sixties, as does the subsequent work done by the young who were shaped by living through that time, a generational legacy about which I have written in my book on storytelling and the Vietnam generation.

In this essay I confine my attention to two American writers. While these two represent only a part of the whole, the intensity of imaginative performance risked by each makes them more than qualified to stand in for those who sought during this time to convert experience into art. Norman Mailer celebrates what is gained during these years; Joan Didion measures what the changes cost. But he is not blue while she is red; American literature does not square off over the decade in any either-or way. Didion and Mailer publish their works of scaled invention in 1968, and each balances in a distinctive way a sense of ground gained with a presentiment of loss. They represent a necessary dialectic between the wisdom born of excess and the damage done by it. Their common enemy is received thought and language, empty convention, cliché. Even in their most conforming moments, they insist upon entering in by way of a unique and personal style.

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Since the subject is Norman Mailer, it will only do to plunge in. We are in The Armies of the Night, Chapter 5, "Toward a Theater of Ideas," when the book (the career, really) finally takes off, our hero being obliged "to notice on entering the Ambassador Theater that he had an overwhelming urge to micturate." The Master of Ceremonies—one of the many roles he will play in the book, along with Novelist, Journalist, Historian, Participant, and Left Conservative—decides he will have to find the Room before he goes on stage. On the way upstairs he tells a young man from Time that he has come to Washington "to protest the war in Vietnam,"

and taking a sip of bourbon from the mug he kept to keep all fires idling right, stepped off into the darkness of the top balcony floor, went through a...