Managing Mailer by Joe Flaherty, Berkeley, 1969.
February 26th, 2009
Joe Flaherty invokes the gravely droll figurative acuity of Henry James and the sweepingly intellectual semantics of Edith Wharton in reconvocating the experience of running the Mailer/Breslin Democratic primary ticket for New York City Mayor in 1968. Such a traditionally imaginative manner of prose is an effective inversion of the riotous Situationalism of the Mailer/Breslin campaign – student takeovers of Queen College; chic Fitzgeraldian post-populuxe cocktail parties at Gloria Steinem’s silk stocking district apartment; Jimmy Breslin’s typically macho Irish fragile alcholic sensitivity breakdown and almost abandoning the cause for good when Mailer wins the Pulitzer Prize; fundraising bashes at the hippie dippie Village Gate where Mailer treats the staid psychedelic stage like a dingy Southern front porch and tirades in his favored blowzy redneck Sheriff voice against liberal youths and Jews and uses un-idioms strictly from the old barracks like “up your screw.”
The book is a rare document of the mid-Lindsay era, when WWII and Korea vets grew thick sideburns and styled their hairs as do the caricatures on the paperback cover art. It is a time when American identity might have been at its most uproariously confused since the 19-oughts, and the nexus of that absorption of beinghoods was New York City, the turf clubs of Right & Left, the 50% polyester suits and 3/4 leather boots, the Forty Deuce grindhouses and Fun City Ivy Leaguers on the City payroll, when a novelist persona might exalt as a controversial media lark and command the resources to formulize a platform. It is of course absurd and totally inaccurate to future thinking that the platform is reduced to transforming New York City into “The 51st State,” but a radical idea by a radical personality during radical times. And Mailer does act like a brute hamfisted jester, with his orotund full-page ads and silly radio jingles and profanity-splotched zingers (the campaign slogan: “No More Bullshit”).
Flaherty keeps his hero continually sincere – Mailer may appear a dadaist but only be
cause on stage he debates a bunch of dry stiffs. For all Mailer’s theatrics, he seems to perform best in quiet settings, like the Union Theological Seminary, and before NYPD administrators in a classroom on East 20th Street. Mailer is least sardonic about the idea of city neighborhoods put in charge of themselves, where communities are enabled to answer to their own cultural infrastructures, set-up with their own City Halls, rather than the usual Big Apple methodology of all areas hovering in on the grand nub of Manhattan like the last open bunker before the bomb drops. Mailer is much more articulate by way of rambunctiously nuanced rhetoric than about how particular philosophy might be executed (though Flaherty claims various position papers drafted by the campaign were later mined for bullet points by other U.S. cities). Just after Mailer was pushing for City statehood, Leon Panetta – Obama’s CIA director – would intimate the same proposition from Lindsay’s camp, but without also pushing for free interborough bikes and Sweet Sundays when city-wide electricity is turned off for a spate.
