The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution

by Marc Weingarten

  Years after the fact, Herr admitted that, going in, he “had no idea what the subject was.” But the latitude that Hayes had given him allowed Herr to roam freely and indulge his literary whims, which meant inventing composite soldiers whose personas were stitched together from what Herr observed during many zonked-out late-night bull sessions over cheap scotch and locally procured marijuana, the psychedelic rock of the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead pounding out of radios and soundtracking this dreadful episode in the soldiers’ lives.

  For the Khesanh stories, which were really designed for the forthcoming big Vietnam book, Herr invented a black soldier who called himself Day Tripper (so named because he hated going out on night missions) and his white running buddy Mayhew, two worn-out grunts whose devil-may-care fatalism squared with Herr’s attitudes about the detached confusion that Khesanh had bred in its entrenched troops. They were a far cry from John Sack’s disillusioned idealists, who, Demirgian notwithstanding, had been careful to keep their insurrectionary tendencies in check with a measure of cautious optimism. Day Tripper and Mayhew bore a closer resemblance to the deserting soldier in Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, subjugating their fear into a demotic sense of the absurd.

  Herr portrayed Day Tripper and Mayhew as the dark side of Abbott and Costello. The soldiers’ plainspoken, schoolboy jive was a shot across the bow to all those deadline humps writing about the “lean, laconic fighters” that John Sack found so distasteful in Time magazine’s coverage. When Mayhew signs up for a four-month extension, Day Tripper lays into him:

  “You jus’ another dumb Grunt. What I gotta talk to you for? It’s like you never hear one word I say to you, ever. Not one word. An’ I know … oh man, I jus’ know you already sign that paper.”

  Mayhew didn’t say anything. It was hard to believe that the two were around the same age.

  “What I gonna do with you, poor f—er? Why … why you jus’ don’ go running out over th’ wire there? Let ’em gun you down an’ get it over with. Here, man, here’s a grenade. Why you jus’ don’ go up backa the shithouse an’ pull the pin an’ lie down on it?”

  “You’re unbelievable! It’s just four months!”

  “Four months? Baby, four seconds in this whorehouse’ll get you greased.”

  Herr captured perfectly the slangy cadence of the soldiers’ speech— and their coarsened psyches as well. Instead of soldiers sending pictures of themselves to their girls back home, Herr wrote of a grunt sending back “a gook’s ear,” soldiers procuring clandestine pot from Vietnamese dealers, men grabbing snatches of haunted sleep that provided no reprieve from their waking nightmares. It was rough stuff, but Hayes let him keep all of it, except for the fucks and motherfuckers, many of which had to be excised.

  The specifics of warfare weren’t as crucial to Herr as what it really felt like to be in that godforsaken place, fighting a meaningless war. The ominous crepuscular sounds, the smell of death everywhere—Vietnam was a pincer movement on the senses, and it was enough to slowly drive strong men mad. But television couldn’t convey that feeling sufficiently in two dimensions, and daily journalism never had the time or the space for it. Having internalized the horror, Herr used a savagely poetic style that appealed to the reader’s emotions rather than his intellect.

  Herr knew that, like John Sack, he was shooting down well-worn myths about the implacable stoicism of upright American soldiers, but it was the only reality he saw fit to report. He also knew that his whip-saw prose, which darted around on a Benzedrine bender, was radical even for Esquire. “I say to myself, ‘Oh, no, you can’t say that! It isn’t done,’” he said. “‘You can’t move from this to that. So and so never did it. And since he never did it, you can’t do it.’” But you reach a point where you realize that of course you can do it. You can do anything. You just have to issue yourself a license to do those things. And then you do them.”

  Herr carried the voices of the soldiers in his head long after he had arrived back in New York. Herr regarded himself as a literary person, almost to a fault, but the grunts’ words had moved him more profoundly than the most powerful war literature. He didn’t have to unduly probe, or ask them leading questions; they would locate the stories on their own, and it was all so terribly eloquent, so eloquently terrible. The dialogue in the Khesanh stories wasn’t directly transcribed from notes; the scenes were drawn from the hazy, half-lit dream world of Khesanh that still burned in Herr’s subconscious. Herr readily admitted that his version of Vietnam was some mutant hybrid of fiction and reportage, but however outrageous it might have read on the page, it was all culled from what he had seen and heard. “Everything … happened for me, even if it didn’t necessarily happen to me,” he said.

  The Khesanh stories, as well as his April 1970 Esquire story “The War Correspondent: A Reappraisal,” were ostensibly a jumping-off point for the book that Herr always intended to write, and even Esquire, in its “Backstage” column of September 1969, had announced that a volume was imminent. Herr was indeed writing, but it wasn’t coming quickly. Shortly after Herr had left Vietnam, photographers Sean Flynn and Dana Stone, two of his closest compatriots in Vietnam, were killed in Cambodia. Herr had been full of hubris and the weird, jangly energy of the war when he returned in the summer of 1969; he felt confident that he could channel all he had witnessed into the book. But now the weight of all that horror was pressing down on him, and he fell into a debilitating clinical depression—what Herr called a “massive collapse”—that led to writer’s block.

  “Sometimes I was crazy in a very public way,” Herr recalled, “and after I crashed, I was crazy in a very private way. Except during the very worst of it, I always knew that it was redeemable. There was a certain point at which I realized that whatever I thought I was doing, I wasn’t completely conscious of what I was actually doing. So as long as I didn’t know what I was doing, I would do whatever came up. I always believed that there was another door on the other side of me that I could go through and come out of with a book under my arm.”

  Herr experienced a “complete paralysis of fear”; he felt like the blocked writer in Stephen King’s The Shining, just writing the same sentence over and over again, filling up endless pages with unusable material. He had the meat of the narrative in hand—the Esquire stories—but no notion of where to start the book and how to resolve it satisfactorily.

  Herr went into psychoanalysis and struggled for six years before the words finally came. “I had trouble adjusting to the seventies,” he told Tom Morgan, who profiled Herr in 1984 for Esquire. “We got fucked up in Vietnam. Lost some dear friends. We didn’t get away all that clean.” In an unpublished passage from Herr’s 1976 Esquire story “High on War,” the writer seemed to be working through his lingering feelings about the war:

  This is already a long time ago, I can remember the feelings but I can’t still have them. A common prayer for the over-attached: You’ll let it go sooner or later, why not do it now? Memory print, voices and faces, stories like filament through a piece of time, so attached to the experience that nothing moved and nothing went away.

  Herr didn’t publish his Vietnam book until 1977, but the long delay didn’t mitigate its impact. Dispatches was recognized as a classic of war literature, one of the few nonfiction Vietnam books that rose to the level of great fiction. “Quite simply,” the New York Times critic C. D. B. Bryan wrote, “Dispatches is the best book to have been written about the Vietnam War…. Herr’s literary style derives from the era of acid rock, the Beatles’ films, of that druggy, Hunter Thompson once-removed-from-reality appreciation of The Great Cosmic Joke.”

  Dispatches was nominated for the 1978 National Book Award, and it has never gone out of print. The book’s echoes reverberated in all of the great films made about the war, from the surreal mindscape of Apocalypse Now (for which Herr wrote the voiceover narration) to the unrepentant brutality of Oliver Stone’s Platoon. Herr couldn’t get away from Vietnam. Even when he moved to London
in 1980 “because I didn’t want to become some kind of horrible media personage,” he continued to receive letters from vets and countless offers from magazine editors to cover some war or another. He turned them all down. “Any more wars? Never again, man,” Herr told Tom Morgan. “Shit, man, every time there’s a shot fired around the world, I get a call from some magazine to go. I don’t want to see it ever again. I don’t want to, man.”

  HISTORY AS A NOVEL,

  THE NOVEL AS HISTORY

  In late May 1964, a time when the majority of Americans still supported the war in Vietnam, there appeared in the New York Herald Tribune an ad signed by 149 draft-age men stating that they wouldn’t fight in Southeast Asia if called to do so. The ad attracted little attention; it was just a benign little cherry bomb, nothing more. The country’s antiwar dissent had yet to coalesce into a critical mass.

  The earliest antiwar protests, such as the teach-ins at the University of Michigan, Kent State, and Berkeley, were relatively modest in size and received only perfunctory news coverage. On July 3, 1964, the day that President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law, a group of protesters led by activist David Dellinger and folk singer Joan Baez gathered at Lafayette Park to protest Vietnam. As a symbolic act of disobedience, the group then kneeled en masse in front of the White House, and found to their surprise that no one cared. The police made no effort to arrest anyone.

  The early antiwar protests were fairly genteel affairs, orchestrated by earnest conscientious objectors, civil rights organizers, and nuclear disarmament activists whose combined ire was not enough to evoke more than a collective shrug by the large majority of Americans who still supported the war effort. Not every peacenik was a protester, either; it was one thing to voice one’s concerns privately, quite another to carry a placard.

  When President Johnson ramped up draft calls from 17,000 a month to 35,000 a month in July 1965, it triggered a wave of domestic protest that pulled in a large coalition of disparate groups, from students and businessmen to housewives and Social Security card carriers. Public figures were also starting to contribute their voices to the dissent. In 1967 the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation sponsored the International War Crimes Tribunal, a plenipotentiary forum whose board members included novelist James Baldwin and existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Using extensive testimony from Vietnamese citizens, journalists, medical experts, and military leaders, the tribunal sought to reprimand the United States for its illegal use of chemical weaponry, particularly napalm, against the North Vietnamese, comparing it to the war atrocities committed by the Nazis during World War II.

  The tribunal was great theater, a display of rhetorical fireworks and moving testimony. At one point Sartre branded tribunal no-show Secretary of State Dean Rusk a “mediocre functionary” and wondered how Rusk, “armed with the miserable arguments with which he amuses the press,” would fare in a face-to-face debate with Bertrand Russell.

  But the tribunal was being held in Stockholm, and its indignant cry was faint and indistinct in the United States, a series of small stories buried in newspapers. A few enterprising activists would bring the debate to the foreground in short order, however. Weaned on the civil rights battles of the early sixties, they were now transferring their energies to domestic resistance against the war, using their flair for street theater and human mobilization in ways that the first-wave protesters could not fathom.

  Jerry Rubin, a former journalist and aspiring socialist who had participated in the earliest Free Speech Movement marches that had coalesced around the University of California campus in Berkeley, was the shrewdest agent provocateur of the antiwar effort. A founding member of the Youth International Movement along with Brandeis University grad and civil rights veteran Abbie Hoffman, Rubin in early 1965 was organizing two days of demonstrations to take place on the Berkeley campus, a call to action that would land Cal at the forefront of student-driven social activism in America. The idea was to bring the world’s leading intellectuals to Berkeley, including Bertrand Russell and muckraking journalist I. F. Stone, to speak out against the war and thus generate big media coverage. The first name on Rubin’s list of speakers was Norman Mailer.

  Rubin’s fellow members on the Vietnam Day Committee, particularly the New Left contingent, vehemently objected. For one thing, Mailer was too controversial, a poor role model for passive resistance. On November 19, 1960, in the waning hours of a party held in his Brooklyn Heights apartment, Mailer had stabbed his second wife, Adele, in the sternum and the back with a penknife, and was sent to Bellevue Hospital for seventeen days of psychiatric observation. That act of violence didn’t sit well with the organizers, nor did Mailer’s penchant for drunken fisticuffs and other petty demonstrations of hairy-chested machismo. A writer who craved attention and respect, Mailer tended to suck all the air out of a room. Not, in other words, a man of the people.

  But Rubin knew better than to reduce Mailer to the sum of his scandals. He had been a fan of Mailer’s journalism, which in Rubin’s view had been the era’s most probing social criticism written expressly for a mainstream audience. In Rubin’s view, “Superman Comes to the Super-mart,” Mailer’s Esquire dispatch from the 1960 Democratic convention, had nailed the dialectic between the Kennedy voters who wanted to see America return to its best version of itself—its crackling dynamism and hunger for social progress made flesh in their young candidate—and the dreary Nixonians who settled for flabby middle-class pieties. Rubin sensed that, given the proper forum, Mailer could articulate the rage and fear of the antiwar constituency with the same rhetorical brilliance he had displayed in that seminal Esquire piece.

  Mailer himself wasn’t so sure. He was, he once wrote when he was forty-four years old, an “embattled aging enfant terrible of the literary world, wise father of six children, radical intellectual, existential philosopher, hard-working author, champion of obscenity, husband of four battling wives, admirable bar drinker, and much exaggerated street fighter, party giver, hostess insulter.” Mailer was a generation removed from the young firebrands of the New Left, whose radicalism had been forged in civil rights organizations like Tom Hayden’s Students for a Democratic Society. Mailer was a World War II veteran who had seen action in the Pacific theater and had written what many still considered the definitive novel of the “good war,” The Naked and the Dead. But that book was nearly two decades old, and since then, Mailer’s literary reputation had waxed and waned.

  The Deer Park, his 1955 novel about spiritual rot in Hollywood for which he had struggled to find a publisher, received some of the most vituperatively negative reviews of Mailer’s career. He was perhaps the most famous writer in America but, in the VDC’s view, for all the wrong reasons. “Mailer has grown a great deal in power of language since he wrote The Naked and the Dead,” wrote Saturday Review critic Granville Hicks in 1967. “Why, then, has he been writing trivia and tripe for the past ten years or more?”

  “There had been all too many years when he had the reputation of being a loser,” Mailer would self-reflexively write. “It had cost him too much. While he could hardly, at this stage of his career, look back on a succession of well-timed and generally established triumphs, his consolation in those hours when he was most uncharitable to himself is that taken at his very worst he was at least still worthy of being a character in a novel by Balzac, win one day, lose the next, and do it with boom!”

  Rubin knew better. Mailer had been an early champion of the Beats, a major theorist of “hip” culture with his essay “The White Negro.” Mailer agreed in principle with the impulses and objectives of the antiwar movement, but he had never been a joiner, not to the extent that he could commit himself to activism in earnest. Deep in his bones, he still thought of himself as a literary establishment figure, an Edwardian of sorts who kept himself at an Olympian remove from organized social movements. Even when he was dabbling with Marxism with his friend Jean Malaquois in the forties, its appeal was largely that of an intellectual construct, a
mode of thought to toss around for a while. Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, he felt, “helps you to think better, but I never thought Marx was right, as far as Communism would solve all our problems.”

  When Rubin called him, Mailer demurred; he had never addressed a large crowd before—Rubin estimated that as many as twenty thousand demonstrators might turn out. Mailer’s chosen forum was not oratory but the written word. And would the young crowd respond to him in any meaningful way or just dismiss him as an old-guard anachronism? Mailer told Rubin he would think about it.

  A week later, he called Rubin back with an offer to present a speech on LBJ; it would be an opportunity to air some grievances against the president that Mailer had been pondering for a while. Some members of the Vietnam Day Committee wanted to screen the speech, but Rubin wouldn’t have it; it was absurd to think that Mailer would agree to that kind of scrutiny. The idea, Rubin argued, was to provide a forum for the march’s participants to offer any viewpoint they so chose. Rubin threatened to quit the VDC unless Mailer was given free rein, and eventually the VDC relented.

  Accompanied by novelist Don Carpenter and poet Michael McClure, Mailer encountered bedlam at every turn at Berkeley—protesters packed shoulder to shoulder on the steps of Sproul Hall, hanging over the balconies and rooftops of the surrounding buildings, chanting pro-NVA slogans and brash incitements to stop the madness. Paul Krassner, the editor and publisher of the underground paper The Realist, who was emceeing the event, introduced Mailer to thunderous applause. Mailer, dressed in a three-piece suit, addressed the crowd: