History of My Reading/ Fall 1967: From "The Physicists" To The Pentagon

Iconic photo--and act--from March on the Pentagon Nov. 1967. Norman Mailer
wrote: "Posed against the line of soldiers, already some historic flowers
 were being placed insouciantly, insolently, and tenderly
in gun barrels by boys and girls." 

And suddenly I was a senior, at the top of the heap and the end of the line.  I got an early lesson in this fact when I arrived on the Knox College campus in Galesburg, Illinois early in the fall of 1967, with a couple of official responsibilities regarding the incoming first years.  I was re-experiencing orientation from the other side of it.

My first responsibility was in regard to the summer reading program for incoming first years.  In an earlier post ( here) I wrote at length about it from a first year's perspective in 1964.  It turns out that my class was only the second to experience this program, when we read the summer before we arrived about the science v. humanities split, through books by and about C.P. Snow, author of the Two Cultures thesis.  There were faculty-led discussions of these books as part of our Orientation week.

Bill Barnhart at one of the three ongoing construction projects
at Knox in fall 1967.  Photo by Leonard Borden.

 In 1967 the books were Giorgio DeSantillana's The Crime of Galileo and a play by Freidrich Durrenmatt, The Physicists. But instead of only faculty members leading discussions for the incomers, third and fourth year students would so for the first time.  There were 16 of us: Bill Barnhart, Jean Belieff, Diane Burwig, Joe Cecchi, Joni Diner, Jack Herbig, Kathy Karsten, Ed Novak, Mary Mangeri, Harvey Sadow, Wendy Saul,  Judy Schmidt, Ron Stern, Ted Szostkowski, Anne Wylie and me.

The Physicists was a fairly new play at the time, written in 1961 (in German; Durrenmatt was a Swiss national) and was a worldwide hit by 1963. It was first produced in New York and got its first US publication in 1964.  According to Samuel Matlock in his essay "The Physicists At Fifty": "Ever since, the play has been part of the canon of high school literature classes in Switzerland, Austria, and Germany, where it is also a favorite choice for high school theater groups and one of the most-performed dramas over the last half century."

The play takes place in an insane asylum where two inmates claim to be the famous physicists Newton and Einstein, while a third man, Mobius, says that he gets private instructions from Solomon.  Each of these men murders a nurse, which brings the police, who can't do much since the murderers are judged insane and are already incarcerated.

But it turns out that Mobius is a real physicist and genius, who has made certain discoveries that could create military supremacy for some political entity, and so he has faked insanity in order to be safely hidden away.  (Curiously, this is somewhat the subplot of the 1954 Japanese Godzilla movie I've written about recently,  Gojira.)  The other two--Newton and Einstein--are also actual physicists, as well being as spies from two superpowers trying to get Mobius' secrets.

Eventually, Mobius convinces them that the world will be much safer if they all stay insane.  But the head of the asylum has been reconstructing Mobius' burned notes, and is now bent on world conquest, under the personal instructions, she says, of Solomon.

The issues are similar to those raised by Gojira, though more complicated and paradoxical, reflecting an absurd nuclear weapons world.  The situation also suggests the 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, which some perceptive programmer scheduled as the movie shown in the Harbach Theatre during orientation.

Unfortunately I don't remember anything about the discussions (and would have forgotten my participation completely except for the Knox Student), and no longer have the books. I suspect however that some members of the Class of 1971 will remember something about them.

 But I very clearly recall my second duty, speaking on behalf of the student literary magazine as part of the introduction to campus organizations that so impressed me my first year.  It was evening, and there must have been several of us making presentations because I sat on the stage in Harbach Theatre for some time.  While I sat there, I wrote what became a kind of poem that would constitute my pitch. When it was my turn, I simply got up and read it--or more accurately, performed it.

It started out very well because I got applause just for the jacket I was wearing--a red team jacket that said Higgins Dairy on the back that I'd acquired at a Galesburg thrift store. (Higgins was a family store with counter and booths and a juke box on South Street near campus, a place I hung out at times.  It closed in 1972.)  In marked contrast to my hometown just weeks before, my long hair and look delighted this crowd.  It seems the 60s hit high schools at the same time as Knox--and perhaps more so, as I was soon to find.

What I wrote and delivered (called "Notes for an Introduction to a Definitive Poem on Sitting on Stages") was a kind of rhythmic poem or stand-up routine, a kind of parody of speeches, very much of the moment, including references to Harvey Sadow's coat, and political and cultural figures, with a few Knox in-jokes that no longer signify, plus a few actual references to the Siwasher (the aforementioned literary magazine.)  It's not much now, but it was great fun and as close as I came to one of my ideals for poetry, which was spontaneous music for the occasion, yet written with a shape rather than complete improvisation.  It was also total performance, since the audience observed me writing it as well as delivering it.  John Cage might have dug it.

Laurie Khan, from 1969 Yearbook

I met a number of first years during orientation, and through them I met others that became part of my senior year.   Laurie Kahn, Celeste Manking, Judy Bowker, Jane Langer, Carol Hartman, Steve Phillips, Michael Shain and Sherwood Kiraly come immediately to mind.  Laurie decided I should represent Flower Power at the Pumphandle.  I said if she made me a lei of flowers I would wear it. She did, so I did, which explains my Sergeant Pepper presence in the senior movie.

My fall 1967 term was unusual in that I made three off-campus trips, including one to each coast.  The first of these was a bus trip to the antiwar demonstration at the Pentagon in Washington in October.

By then I was living in a big wood frame Prairie Gothic house on First Street.  Once again I'd returned to find myself homeless when I suddenly didn't have the place I thought I had in the spring.  Bill Thompson offered space in the First Street unfinished basement, but thanks to the kindness of Leonard Borden who freed up one of his two rooms, I moved into a bright, airy front room looking out on the quiet tree-lined street.  (Leonard soon found another place he liked better, and Ric Clinebell moved into his room.  George Otto had the attic second floor.)

I believe all the First Street houses were owned by the college, preliminary to being torn down for new college buildings in a couple of years.  Two English department faculty also lived there--Richard Alexander and his wife next door to us, and a few doors down was Robin Metz and his family.  Both Metz and Alexander were there when the meeting to organize our participation in the Pentagon events was held in our back yard.  We stood in the waning sunshine with green tea in paper cups and Jimi Hendrix blasting from speakers.  I remember the mood becoming bleaker as the light dimmed and the temperature dropped, and the few people left contemplated the uncertain dangers ahead.  The March was organized by a broad and nebulous coalition, and nobody could predict what marchers would do, or how the Pentagon would react.

But enough people eventually signed up, the bus was hired, and we boarded on South Street in high spirits and with a Galesburg Register Mail reporter watching us. As I climbed aboard he asked me, in the abrupt way the question was always asked, "Are you a hippie?"  "No," I said, in my best John Lennon in Help! manner, "I'm a flippie."   It was a spontaneous retort, appropriately flippant, and I immediately forgot about it.  After we returned however, someone showed me the resulting newspaper article which helpfully explained that the flippies were a new Midwestern offshoot of the California hippies.  Who knew?

Though protest and civil disobedience events took place in the days before and after, the official March on the Pentagon was on Saturday October 21. Shortly afterward I wrote a few unpublished paragraphs about my experiences. It seems we sat in the sun near the Lincoln Memorial for hours, chatting while waiting for boring speeches to end, then walked en masse fitfully across a bridge, military helicopters buzzing over us "like Olympian mutant flies."

Our group must have been pretty far back in the crowd of perhaps 100,000 (maybe fewer, maybe more.).  By the time we got to the Pentagon we--that is, me and the people I was with-- basically became unequipped medics, helping people down a hill blinded by gas or mace, running damp cloths for gas victims and later, food and cigarettes from the parking lot to the area near the building where demonstrators sat, facing armed troops.

Siwasher cover by Jack Brown. Note
the soldier pointing his rifle at the crowd.

I do recall getting close enough to the building itself to witness a scene similar to the one captured by Jack Brown's photo which we subsequently made the cover of the March 1968 Siwasher.

Mostly what I remember is, later in the night, the sight of bonfires all over the huge Pentagon parking lot, as we waited for our buses, listening to sporadic stories and rumors about what was happening elsewhere, punctuated by loud indecipherable speeches and announcements from a p.a.,  sounding alternately pedestrian and hysterical.  Earlier some young men dramatically burned their draft cards.  I burned mine when we needed kindling for a fire to keep us warm.

My written description was part of an ongoing fictional account of this year, my never-ending and never completed college novel.  It was preceded by a paragraph that suggest part of my mood in this senior year, in the contexts of 1967-68.  "Before he left for the Pentagon, [name of character] did not feel in touch with his body.  He felt as if he were communicating with it over long distances, through weak signals, dimly, as if trying to see through rain.  Even when communication seemed possible...the code was imperfect."

"But for several days, starting with the day he decided to go, until sometime on the trip back, his mind and body worked together, were together.  They seemed, then, to know each other.  They might have been old friends."

Someone else's bus trip, but reminiscent

What I remember most clearly is not the Pentagon but the bus trip getting there. We had pretty much a full bus of students, including first years, with two faculty members, the aforementioned Alexander and Metz.   A younger student, Bill Long, has his guitar, and after he played it awhile, I asked him to pass it over.  I strummed it to myself for a second, realizing it was in some kind of open tuning.  He laughed--saying he wondered if I was going to just bash right in--and tuned it to standard tuning.

 Before moving on to some Donovan tunes ("Universal Soldier" by Buffy Sainte-Marie for certain), the only song I remember playing was the Woody Guthrie car song ("Take me for a ride in your car-car..."), the version done by Peter, Paul and Mary. Robin Metz approved of this latter choice, saying that the humor diffused the tension.  Tension?  He thought there was heavy male rivalry going on, which there might have been.  But I was clueless as usual.

The trip back at night was much quieter, as most of us slept.  When we stopped at one of those overlit highway restaurants and "comfort stations," several of our female students got fed up with the lines at the ladies' room and invaded the stalls in the men's room.  I remember Robin Metz observing, "this is the most revolutionary thing that's happened all weekend."

The definitive account of the March on the Pentagon was by Norman Mailer, eventually published in a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Armies of the Night. He wrote this shortly after the events, and estimated that there would never be a complete and accurate account.  As far as I know, there hasn't been.

Immediately after my fictional protagonist returned from the Pentagon, someone told him, "I hear Norman Mailer was there."  "Oh?" he said.  "I didn't see him."
And of course we didn't--we were too far back and away from the action, which included hundreds of arrests and some beatings.  We got our whiffs of tear gas, though--tear gas was one of the chief smells of the 60s.  So Mailer's account, which I read as it was first published in Harper's Magazine, remains separate from my experience.

But he makes general observations in the book, especially about the mood of the times, that reflected what I felt then--notably that America might well be insane.
He also made observations that I didn't believe then but that I do now, such as motivations for becoming part of a movement may well include self-pity and self-righteousness.

He was right about the feeling at the Pentagon that it was one kind of army confronting another, although he did tend to over-inflate the historical importance of this event (comparing it to a Civil War battle).  I don't recall believing this even at the time, though I certainly felt the sense of a besieging ragtag army huddling around its campfires that night in the parking lot.  I saw my participation as morally and politically necessary, and though I had hopes that these demonstrations would end the war, I feared it was probably futile. But I was too impatient to see it as the beginning of something that might last (as Mailer wrote) 20 years.  The six more years the protests and the war lasted were bitterly and soul-numbingly endless.

Mailer of course was up at the front of the action with the leaders of the March and the celebrities of protest.  This may be the distinguishing--and today the almost unbelievable-- feature of the Pentagon events, that its major celebrity leaders were one of America's foremost poets (Robert Lowell) and novelists (Mailer), and one of its major nonfiction writers (Dwight Macdonald, whose essay-review of Michael Harrington's book on poverty, The Other America, had thrilled me when I read it in the New Yorker in high school.)  As well as America's #1 baby doctor, Dr. Benjamin Spock.

Mailer deliberately got himself arrested, and seems to have gotten the stiffest sentence of any nonviolent protestor, though he spent only one night in jail.  He records for posterity some of the notable moments of preceding events, such as Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin's defense of men who claimed conscientious objector status because they were morally opposed to the Vietnam War, though it was being granted only to absolute pacifists who could cite their church's doctrine: "...for the rights of a man whose conscience forbids him to participate in a particular war are as deserving of respect as the rights of a man who conscience forbids him to participate in any war at all." 

Mailer ends this book with a metaphor that has resonance for this historical moment in America, as it did for 1967:

"The death of America rides in on the smog.  America--the land where a new kind of man was born from the idea that God was present in every man not only as compassion but as power, and so the country belonged to the people; for the will of the people--if the locks of their life could be given the art to turn--was then the will of God.  Great and dangerous idea!  If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil.  Who by now could know where was what?  Liars controlled the locks."

I don't seem to have heard his name much in recent decades, but Norman Mailer was an important writer and major public figure from the 1950s through much of the 1970s.  He was so identified with the 1960s in fact, that when Esquire Magazine issued Smiling Through the Apocalypse, a still fascinating compendium of essays published in its pages that decade, a caricature of Norman Mailer was front and center on its cover, with James Baldwin and Tom Wolfe as acolytes.

Or maybe it's just me who forgot him.  I read a lot of his earlier and current work in the 60s and 70s, and he was an inescapable presence on the kind of television programs ( Jack Paar, Steve Allen, Dick Cavett, David Susskind, William F. Buckley, etc.) that mostly don't exist anymore.  (Can anyone today believe that frequent talk show guests once included Margaret Mead?  Or even that Esquire's reporters at the 1968 Democratic Convention included William Burroughs and Jean Genet?)

What remains of my Mailer book collection is negligible.  I used to own several of his novels, and I can't believe I lost Advertisements for Myself somewhere along the way. What remains is centered on the late 60s and early 1970s, when (if memory serves) I wrote about him a couple of times for publication, including a review in the Boston Phoenix of a collection of minor work titled Existential Errands.  

Mailer could be exasperating but he was usually provocative and sometimes stunningly articulate and insightful.  (Armies of the Night contains a version of my favorite Mailer quote: "Totalitarianism is the interruption of mood.")

He ran afoul of the women's movement (in its first dogmatic phase; we're currently in its second--witness "The Revolt of the Feminist Law Profs") with his book The Prisoner of Sex.  His views on sex were always weird (in Armies he calls himself a Left conservative, which describes more than his politics) and his views on women, while more nuanced than those times permitted,  were often off.  Still, I admired his almost chivalrous defense of the literary merits of D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller.  In fact, he started me reading Miller.

I especially valued insights on writing and reading, some of which I remember as his (that a book and a reader must be ready for each other), and others I probably just absorbed.  After the new orientations of age and the changing times reduced his public presence, Mailer became more of a full-time novelist. Unfortunately for me, I couldn't get through the results.  I recall beginning a paperback of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Executioner's Song over coffee at the counter of Lee's Restaurant, but in the end I couldn't sustain hundreds of pages of interest in the subject of a murderer.

 I read some of his Egypt novel in a magazine, but that didn't motivate me to get the book. It seems his CIA novel, Harlot's Ghost, is considered one of his best, but again, not that fascinated with the CIA, at least not yet.  Unafraid of incredibly large themes, his last two novels were The Gospel According to the Son (as told by Jesus) and The Castle in the Forest (about the youth of Hitler, the New York Times best-selling book of 2007, the year of Mailer's death.)   They passed me by completely. These books and this reader were not yet ready for each other.

Mailer's polemics remain memorable, especially his concentration on the spiritual as well as physical disaster of pollution, television commercials, the corporate culture and both actual and metaphorical plastics.  He ranted early and often until these observations became common ground.

By the 1990s and during as much of this century as he lived, his sense of history was astute, as expressed in various interviews (some of them now on YouTube.)  He saw what I saw: a certain American--and perhaps, human--path of progress destroyed by Vietnam and the assassinations of the 1960s.  He also remained highly cogent on literature and the soul of a writer.

So maybe he wrote too much and he talked too much, and exhausted us all.  But he remains a complicated model of intelligent inquiry.  In my notes still stuck in my 1972 copy of Existential Errands, evidently for that review, I describe his process as running experiments in his mind, and reporting on them in detail. (I recall that my--male--editor would have preferred a simple hatchet job.)  When Mailer was right he was stunningly right, but just as importantly, he had the integrity and courage to be wrong.