The Power and the Vainglory

...a man who wheeled whole complexes of caution into every gesture—he was after all an engineer who put massive explosives into adjoining tanks and then was obliged to worry about leaks...

...In the end, with the astronauts safely aboard the recovery ship Hornet, Mailer brings himself back to normal on his beloved Cape Cod, amid the familiar hot lunacies of a Provincetown summer and the painfully repetitive screams and recriminations of a dying marriage...

...Was the voyage of Apollo 11 the noblest expression of a technological age, or the best evidence of its utter insanity...

...Still, the book is equally, at times simultaneously, the more familiar account of Norman Mailer brought near to drowning in a tidal wave of narcissism...

...The times were loose...

...Caught between the clean, methodical world of outer space and the turmoil of his inner space, Mailer has written an embarrassingly inflated book...

...Starting out as a phenomenally lucrative assignment from Life (which Mailer with his thirsty horde of children and ex-wives could not for a minute afford to turn down), Of a Fire on the Moon became a turgid act of astonishing intellectual and metaphoric hubris, with far too little compensating enlightenment...

...Mailer raises a number of questions that are anything but irrelevant both to contemporary assessments of the event and to the more complex judgment that will be rendered by future generations: "Apollo was the god of the sun, so NASA did not fail to use his name for the expedition to the moon...

...A too adroit fluency is never its own reward...

...Under Mailer's demonic scrutiny, von Braun "had the subtle look of a fat boy who has gathered the shooters in many a game...

...One thing is certain: Mailer is a supremely gifted American writer, as adept at self-destruction as he is with language and metaphor, who has not written a novel worth serious attention in a long time...

...All the rest is vainglory...

...But this is only Mailer's self-serving illusion...

...too often we are given merely standard Mailerism on the rocketry of sex as well as the sexuality of rockets...

...God or the Devil--that was the question behind the trip" is the leitmotif of the book, but the resonance lies in the metaphor, not in the rather simple-minded alternatives...

...so does the nature of corporate capitalism in America and its auxiliary atrocity, the Wasp executive...

...Similarly, in the tedious and suffocatingly verbose chapter on the psychology of machines, Mailer goes off on a dozen tangents at once, their connection with the primary subject remaining obscure to the end: His pet bete noire of the Western world, plastics, gets the by now familiar thrashing...

...others, waiting out a dry spell, hope that a cut-and-dried concentration on facts will in time cause the fictional rains to fall more sweetly...

...The reporter's eviscerating wit crackles through his account of a dinner given by Time Inc...

...Norman Mailer, the naughty Heldentenor of the age of personal journalism, is no philosopher--philosophers don't swagger, and they revere precisely the kind of mental discipline and order that Mailer has devoted his career to flouting...

...In the early stages of his assignment to the moonshot Mailer was not yet obsessed with the Large Unanswerable Questions that began intruding later on...

...In place of the first person singular, Mailer calls himself Aquarius throughout, in a tiresome little astrological joke, and the device can be hazardous...

...For the cliche that "I" would not utter is never penciled out by Aquarius, who "sometimes thinks the reason the American family is in so much danger is because life in ranch houses is so deadly...

...The book is rich with such marvelous asides, in the end far more interesting than Mailer's agonized and philosophically clotted pokes and prods at the ultimate significance of the moon landing in man's history...

...His artful counterpoint of the cosmically public against the achingly private might indeed have worked, if he had only resisted the pretentious bromide...

...it was [Aquarius'] profession to live alone with thoughts at the very edge of his mental reach...

...This may explain why his recent journalistic accounts--of the peace march to the Pentagon in 1967, of the Presidential conventions of 1968, and now of the Apollo moon landing in the summer of 1969--have relied more and more strongly on the tools, tricks, persuasions, manner, and mannerisms of Norman Mailer the nonpracticing novelist...

...As an example of Mailer's extraordinary talent for writing prose that seems constructed of silk and steel, these lines cannot be bettered...

...But his taste deserts him here, as it does more than once in the book--particularly in a sniggering account of a party at which the host projected a pornographic movie onto the television set during Nixon's speech at a banquet honoring the astronauts on their return...

...Buttressed by technical manuals and NASA news releases, Mailer hacks his way through the lushly overgrown technical jungle of celestial mechanics, rocket engineering, and astrophysics--this time he really did his homework...

...Only in the first third of this book does the potpourri of Mailer, technology and philosophy ever get off the ground...

...Of a Fire on the Moon (Little, Brown, 472 pp., $7.95) does have evidence of Mailer's conscientious approach to the task of describing the moonshot...

...as if like a beast enraged with the passion of gorging nature, we looked now to make incisions into the platinum satellite of our lunacy, our love, and our dreams...

...Conceivably, a convincing case could be made for the moonshot as a tremendously significant event in the history of human adventure, or of man's capacity for courage...

...He "could not forgive the astronauts their resolute avoidance of a heroic posture...

...In those rare moments when Of a Fire on the Moon succeeds in describing, with beautifully supple and evocative prose, a great event of our time, it is fascinating in its power...

...Mailer's apocalyptic view of the astronauts' mission was in exasperating contrast to their own egoless, unaggressive neutrality...

...The journalism of Norman Mailer seems to fit both these motives perfectly, but he is too wildly individualistic a figure and voice to be placed with satisfactory neatness in any literary category...

...Mailer the Harvard-educated Jew from Brooklyn scrabbling with grubby fingernails at the Establishment fortress of "Waspitude...

...Yet some novelists are drawn to journalism by the green smell of money...

...for Wernher von Braun a day before the momentous Apollo 11 takeoff...

...Rarely do we get the cleansing irony of shrewd self-mockery that was a particular pleasure of Armies of the Night...

...Much of it is an arid stretch of technical materials that he struggles in vain to transform into 'the intelligent reader's guide to space science...

...With his profligate zeal for tossing out the best of his lines with manic insouciance, literally throwing them away, Mailer adds: "Indeed, what is plumbing but the prevention of treachery in closed systems...

...and Mailer the middle-aged, paunchy altar boy to Dionysus, wrenching body and soul into bone-cracking, mind-boggling contortions as he tries to make metaphysical and epistemological sense of the Apollonian world of American super-technology, serene and smug in its perfervid orderliness...

...Teddy Kennedy's car went off the bridge at Chappaquiddick with Mary Jo Kopechne and the hopes of the Democratic Party went with them as a proper end to a period which had begun with the suicides of Ernest Hemingway and Marilyn Monroe...

...Philosophically he is nowhere near as tough as he would like to think...

...He describes with brilliant humor and perception the prelaunch ceremonies of interviews, dinners, parties, briefings, and tours through the gray chambers of Houston's Manned Spacecraft Center...

...Even the ladies' magazines would censor such banality...

...Less offensively, but with equally meretricious vulgarity, Aquarius drones at the end: "We had contracted for a lunar program in 1961 and what a decade had followed...

...But they cast little light either on the moonshot as covered by a reporter, or on Mailer's hard-worked, hard-sought speculations and conclusions about the fundamental meaning of this technological bravado...

...It was somehow improper for a hero to be without flamboyance, as if such modesty deprived his supporters of any large pleasure in his victories...

...Earlier, before the hot air clogged his perception, Mailer appeared content with this exposition: "It was somehow superior to see the astronauts and the flight of Apollo 11 as the instrument of such celestial or satanic endeavors, than as a species of sublimation for the profoundly unmanageable violence of man...

...Although Mailer tries, in the course of his tortuous pseudophilosophical wanderings, to formulate a better interpretation of the nature of dreams than Freud's--one that he thinks might be more serviceable for understanding the psychology of astronauts--his emendation of Freud is richer in metaphor than in psychoanalytic substance...