Mailer’s ‘Miami’ glimpse into tumultuous time

“Miami and the Siege of Chicago”

by Norman Mailer (New York Review Books, 224 pages, $14.95)

In 1968 Norman Mailer covered the political conventions for Harper’s magazine. These were the glory days of literary journalism, when Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Truman Capote and William S. Burroughs stepped into the ring to ensure, as Mailer wrote, that there would be “no history without nuance.”

It was a precarious time in America: “The country was in a throe, a species of eschatological heave. … Left-wing demons, white and Black, working to inflame the conservative heart of America, while Right-wing devils exacerbated Blacks and drove the mind of the New Left and liberal middle class into prides of hopeless position. And the country roaring like a bull in its wounds, coughing like a sick lung in the smog.”

Many times in the course of his reporting, Mailer writes that he has failed the reader, America, himself; he feels, like the rest of the country, at a loss. But when he is on the ground, recording the weather, the feeling in the air, he puts television to shame.

Of the chaotic Democratic convention in Chicago, he writes:

“(T)he Democratic Party had here broken in two before the eyes of a nation like Melville’s whale charging right out of the sea. A great stillness rose up from the street through all the small noise of clubbing and cries, small sirens, sigh of loaded arrest vans as off they pulled.”

Reading “The Siege of Chicago,” newly reissued in paperback, gives us front-row seats to what seems, looking back, like the geologic moment in which the Democrats were separated from America.

“If politics was property,” Mailer writes in the end, “a convention was a massive auction, and your bid had to reach the floor in time.”