FLYING WHERE WITH NORMAN WHO
Plunkitt, George Washington
(•- — r - (advertisement) BY George Washington Plunkitt Imagine an intelligent thinking person runnng up his pennant for an ignoramus like Wilhelm Reich and describing the orgasm as...
...Everywhere he wanders be it the steps of the Pentagon, Chicago's Grant Park, the Men's room at the Standard station or the playpens of Greenwich Village, the theme is always of struggle...
...H o w are we to classify such a creature...
...Shaken by the experience he uttered one intelligent statement (his all time record...
...worth a reader's burdening his lap...
...The Naked and the Dead, his first and finest sausage, groimd out over twenty years ago, was written with his wife Beatrice on whom he based the title...
...Some say he seeks the Nobel prize for pointlessness...
...What is moral is whatever makes Air-mailer feel good, and he is about to die of indigestable morality...
...D o not the dons of Newspeak now talk of the whole episode as a jolly affair, and, though just a smidgen naughty, essential to your continued quest of Shakespeare's throne...
...Air-mailer now slaps pages of rambling metaphors between two hard covers, deserts the cause of socialism to wring every drop of profit from his new hard-bound sausage and staggers off to cash the Kapitalist's check allowing him to continue his dissolute life of plagiarisms and gas...
...Thus in accordance with the code duello I challenge the fraud to meet m e on the field of honour at dawn on his feast day, 1 April 1969...
...Por ejemplo: The individual, claims Air-mailer, engages in an unrelenting battle with society...
...His agonized death could take weeks, even years, and in the meantime his nuisance index increases geometrically...
...Perhaps so Norm, but this has only endeared you to the dons, for it certifies you as a man attunded to the times, a man with whom they can identify...
...Our State Department is the vector of all the world's woe and its roaming diplomats should formally don sack cloth and with ashes dispense Lincoln Continentals to sagacious Bedouin Mullahs and the Grand Panjandrum of Lapland...
...Thus, after heroically advancing on America with many correct impulses and much trenchant social criticism, he concludes in the most chaotic blizzard of contradictions...
...Of course, there exists not one writer of contemporary American fiction — save Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...
...Ultimately in convalescing from his "over-brilliant" mind he roasted it for two years with ultra-violet treatments of marijuana, attempted the happy dispatch of his third wife in a decade, and achieved admission to Bellevue Academy for the Deranged...
...As he bounds across the land sniffing society's fire hydrants and yapping to all the world of the odorous truths he finds there, he is little more than a puppy with a pen...
...Praising deep breathing individualism, he still advocates suffocating socialism...
...11...
...Perhaps no m a n in the history of American letters has mined more meaning from the commode...
...Others assert his tutor was an emigrant faith healer from Kentucky, but I feel the person having greatest influence was his mother, Fanny Air-Mailer, an itinerant schoolteacher and the person who first acquainted him with that eternal verity, the toilet...
...Recoiling from those deformities 10 American society inflicts on the individual...
...r - (advertisement) BY George Washington Plunkitt Imagine an intelligent thinking person runnng up his pennant for an ignoramus like Wilhelm Reich and describing the orgasm as "the inescapable exstential moment...
...Air-mailer has assiduously attempted construction of a value structure worthy of supporting all the tacky Rojacks of the world but is himself a staggeringly imethical hind living like a dervish on the thresholds of hell...
...William F. Buckley, Jr., editor of our competition, finds him "an utter and hopeless mess...
...Assuredly this will be history's verdict...
...Some say he has absorbed a great deal from Karl Marx, Jean Malquois and scotch on his cornflakes...
...Yet the nation's literary dons have fallen on this semiliterate gas station attendant, lionizing his mad scribblings until he now reigns with those American immortals embossed on the cover of Newspeak magazine...
...Ever since Airmailer has viewed the world as a grand metaphorical evocation of the emunctory process...
...But the blizzard worsens...
...William Faulkner found similar exposure degrading, but Air-mailer was elated, and when interviewed, he earnestly jabbered all sorts of nonsense like a plumed Bantu strutting across the red carpets of the United Nations...
...Assuredly they do, and now imbelic publishers and editors implore you to empty your waste paper basket on their desks that they might publish your most trifling doodle...
...Though a critic of the "other-directed" he, in Miami and the Siege of Chicago, drones for pages about his fear that "the kids" no longer adjudge sagging Norman groovy...
...Of all the dogs under the Republic's Big Top he is most interesting, for it is fascinating to watch a young dog die...
...But today as he yaps and wags his tail the nation sits on tinterhooks...
...Alas...
...He lamented ". . . for the rest of m y life m y work will be considered as the work of a man with a disordered mind...
...a madman...
...You can see it in his act...
...Mincing cheap pork with gluts of filler, the final greasy-skinned product is tough and, to coimoisseurs of baloney, unpalatable...
...As solipsism's poet laureate Airmailer is — beyond being his own baloney mill — his own Jay Walter Thompson advertising agency, and though exhibiting prodigious skill as a Madison Avenue Bright Boy, it has been at the expense of his baloney...
...But metaphors whose implied comparison is to what, no one quite knows — and Air-mailer has not the time to explain unless through another metaphor...
...in spite of an excellent start, he still ends in mid air...
...For notified by an anemophilous ideology fertilized wdth the most typhoonish vraids, he just cannot anchor himself to a desk long enough to sort things out in his drafty cranium...
...His books become even less thoughtful, more pretentious, muzzily discursive...
...In quest of personal liberation he endorses the authoritarian left...
...But not at the U N . For here the struggle should end in a saturnalia of hugs and kisses...
...If you can imagine all this you have not imagined an intelligent person, you have envisioned Norman Air-mailer, a bellowing trivial oaf who rises above America's literary landscape, like a weeping willow, in the Gobi Desert...
...Yet in An American Dream Air-mailer's hero, a befuddled sop, Rojack by name, is socially, economically and psychically so enslaved by the Land of the Free he ends up, after twohundred seventy hideous pages, just another middle aged subscriber to Playboy...
...Forever more reliant on his advertising agency, he is forever more strident, forever more pointless, forever more self-indulgent, forever more doomed...
...But how long must we await his passing, how long will his show drag on...
...Air-mailer has hypothesized his ideal life-style, "the hipster," w ho pressurized with ego and booze drifts unaffected by America's atmospheric pressures...
...he might even write another book...
...Western civilization deserves better, and m y acute sense of civic responsibility accruing from twentynine years in the Boy Scouts of America counsels m e to remedial action...
...Tsk tsk and pooh pooh...
...After The Naked and the Dead he jousted across America making a surrealistic fool of himself, appearing tipsily on television, blubbering into microphones and generally collapsing in a puddle of self-indulgence...
...An Air-mailer polemic is like a quarter mile race begun two-hundred twenty yards from the edge of a cliff...
...Washington Star Syndicate, Inc...
...How America's literary zombiehood has paid for his metaphors...
...I say he is pursuing a citation from The United Association of Journeymen and Apprentices of the Plumbing and Pipe Fitting Industry of the United States and Canada...
...Then imagine his assaying illness as a "malfunction of inner communication between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind...
...He could commit no impropriety, shriek nothing too foolish...
...Yet, I suspect, the exigesis of Air-mailer would leave even the editors of Newspeak a little embarrassed...
...And it is a certitude that Norman is about to kick...
...But damn the aesthetics, m y journalist's addiction to objectivity urges m e to directness and finality — the man is a hypocrite, and not a pleasant one like Monsignor Eugene McCarthy, not a dignified one like His Excellency, U Thant, but a morbid one...
...Wherever he went he exuded the m a d charm of Bug House Square, and the wise m e n of American letters nodded approvingly — America had produced another literary genius, another Nelson Algren...
...Nixon, the "most interesting figure at the Republican Natonal Convention" and cancer, "a result of the conformity of modem architecture...
...Critics quibble over the constituent elements of Air-mailer's work...
...As for weapons I have no preference, but only that we use something more genuine than his prose, perhaps rubber daggers and cap pistols...
...From then on his work has gone into accelerating declivity...
...He performs at all the side shows (Chicago, Washington, Berkeley . . . ) , drops $150,000 into an abortive movie starring himself as an idiot, and addresses supercilious open letters to President Nixon...
...Nations do not struggle with one another, men do...
Vol. 2 • May 1969 • No. 4
