Reflections on a Star-Crossed Aquarius
OF A FIRE ON THE MOON by Norman Mailer. 472 pages. Little, Brown. $7.95.
Scorpio had been brooding about his much abused deviated septum when a copy of Norman Mailer's Of a Fire on the Moon arrived. It was a confrontation that would measure the dimensions of his dread. To begin with, Mailer, born Jan. 31, 1923, called himself Aquarius throughout the book. But there were other things to cause one to worry. Although Scorpio shared Aquarius' tendencies toward water displacement, there were incompatibilities. Aquarians were eccentric and extremely difficult to judge. Uranus had bestowed on them the gift of radical vision and strong impulses to alter the status quo. On the other hand, Scorpios--ruled by Pluto and Mars--were drawn to private, clandestine lives. Like the stinging arachnid of their sign, some could be dangerous in a hellish way. Scorpio had a habit of seeking warmth in the boots of bigger men. The safariing Hemingway, a Cancer, would rarely forget to shake his out in the morning.
Yet Scorpio would yield to no man in his respect for Aquarius. Insight-for-insight, metaphor-for-metaphor, few writers could touch him. His ability to perceive, absorb and organize details and abstractions into platoons of charging prose were proof of his exceptional intelligence. As a social critic, he had an extraordinarily keen nose for the hydrants of power.
Besides, Scorpio had been an Aquarius rooter from the start. Although he had the same affectionately ambiguous feelings toward him that he once held for the Brooklyn Dodgers, he followed Aquarius' erratic career with a kid brother's awe and expectation. To go directly from The Bobbsey Twins to The Naked and the Dead was not an experience one overcame easily.
Scorpio had often found himself troubled about Aquarius' novels, however. What visions of damnation, for instance, smoked in Aquarius' head when in The Deer Park he had Marion the pimp say, "No one ever loved anyone except for the rare bird, and the rare bird loved an idea or an idiot child." Could it be that Aquarius, the nice Jewish boy from Long Branch, N.J., and Brooklyn, N.Y., the kid who loved model airplanes and went to Harvard to study aeronautical engineering--could it be that the youth committed to the ideals of democratic socialism and the young man who fought the Imperial Japanese in World War II had despaired of the sweet grapes of rational humanism? Had the frustration and pressure of not writing another novel as successful as The Naked and the Dead soured him on himself, curling his talent and imagination against itself? Had Aquarius begun to turn into the sort of God seeker who searched for the back door to salvation? The questions were too big for Scorpio. With the courage of his quotations, he had to agree with Leon Daudet. On such matters, "criticism must yield to theology."
Fortunately, it would not have to. Aquarius was no saint. There were his marital breakups and boozy brawls. There had been times when he was up on Benzedrine and down on Seconal and the conviction that he had burned out his talent. Aquarius not only had learned to live with dread, he had learned to use it. If he had not ever quite justified his claims to be a novelist of the first rank, he found journalism could do many of the things the novel used to do when the intellectual communities had been more easily located and defined. In The White Negro, his non-fiction plunge into the world of the hipster, he channeled his thoughts on existentialism, black sexuality, the psychic doldrums of the 1950s, and the depression of the Cold War with its pervasive threat of instant atomic death. It was a controversial essay, but it helped put Aquarius back in circulation.
A decade later, The Armies of the Night, Aquarius' Pulitzer prizewinning coverage of the antiwar march on the Pentagon, still finds him at the height of his unique powers. It ratified the intuitive style and willingness to take public risks that Aquarius demonstrated in Advertisement for Myself--a combination scrapbook, anthology, autobiography and job application. That was a kind of journalism, too. But the job Aquarius wanted was Hemingway's, and he wasn't modest or reticent about asking for it.
Aquarius, in his own words, was "imprisoned with a perception which will settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time."
So it wasn't too surprising to find Aquarius at the beginning of Of a Fire on the Moon recalling his anger at not being asked by the New York Times to comment on Hemingway's suicide. Yet to Scorpio the whole beginning seemed too pat. There was that shopworn Hemingway quote about sleeping with "that old whore death." Not to mention Aquarius' ritual report on the state of his liver, and his recent infatuation with police work: he would prowl Cape Kennedy and the Houston control station like some kind of detective of philosophy. In addition, there was his exploitation of an easy irony: He was an Aquarian, yet not of this Aquarian Age of psychedelic blast-offs and amplified youthquakes.
Before his psychic moon exploration was to end, the philosophical cop image would give way to a sort of Yankee Merlin at King NASA's court. Aquarius, who had certain powers of mimicry, would come to resemble a funky, dejected alchemist who had failed to fit a Saturn rocket, acres of computers and the three astronauts into his Manichaean retorts and crucibles.
Was God or the Devil at the controls of Apollo 11? That was the question that pursued Aquarius. Were Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins, wired and tuned into a vast electronic network, the priests of a new religion? Were they the revised editions of an embattled God who had decided to re-create man as half machine rather than lose him entirely to the devil of technological progress? Where was the heroic mythology that would make a warm place for man among the hardware? Was art now indistinguishable from engineering?
These and other questions were to bubble up through the book as savory tautologies. But deep down, Aquarius and Scorpio knew they would never turn to gold. In the end, there would he only the ancient gray moon rocks talking their number language to spectroscopes and computers--the machines Aquarius saw as "some species of higher tapeworm was quietly ingesting the vitals of God."
It was, indeed, nothing less than the total defeat of all that had been central to Aauarius' besieged romanticism. Yet Scorpio could not avoid the conclusion that there was a touch of the put-on and package-deal about the whole enterprise of covering the moon shoot. The flimsy mask of Aquarius itself seemed to have less to do with its wearer's famous ego than with the self-kidding that well-established products sometimes employ in their advertisements. There was, after all, a fortune involved. The gross from the serialization in LIFE, the book version and all world-wide rights would be more than $1 million. Aquarius had long since shed the intellectual's frequent ambiguity toward money. He needed it too much. There were obligations to former wives and his six children. His fourth marriage was breaking up. He had taken a couple of debt-defying leaps at moviemaking. He needed to buy time to try and write the big novel that his admirers knew was dormant in him.
Prelaunch Putdown. Beyond such necessities. Scorpio felt that Aquarius went for the big money because it was an unambiguous way of keeping score--of measuring himself against the competition. There was the possibility that his market value would never be higher. The past two years had brought him to a pinnacle of praise and publicity. He was one of the best. But the fact was that he had never made Jacqueline Susann or Erich Segal-style profits for his publishers.
Nevertheless, Aquarius was a professional who would always try to give the customers their money's worth and then some. If many of the metaphors in Of a Fire on the Moon seemed familiar, if Aquarius often strained for effect and struck false resonances until he reminded one of Dimitri Tiomkin's movie music, there was still much to admire and enjoy. The description of the prelaunch press conference was perfection. There was Von Braun, completely at ease with his Hitler past, translating the question of a German reporter and then bringing the house down by apologizing to the Japanese correspondents that he couldn't do the same for them. Although not the ranking NASA official present, he stole the show. Aquarius respected him for it, even though he described him as looking like "the head waiter of the largest hofbrau house in Heaven." Aquarius was famous for that kind of putdown, although he himself offered the observer a variety of choices. In his steel-rim glasses and vested pinstripe suit, he was not unlike a Mafia accountant. Casually attired at his Brooklyn Heights brownstone amid the boarding nets, ropes and trapezes that decorated the living room, he could resemble a high school gym teacher who had a piece of a profitable summer camp.
In addition to calling the plays of power, prestige and publicity, Aquarius had done some fine, moody descriptions of Cape Kennedy and Houston. He was unusually good at narrating the nuts and bolts of the flight. But there was absolutely no suspense. One knew beforehand that Apollo 11 would succeed and that Aquarius would become stranded in orbit with his preoccupations about corporate capitalism, WASPhood, the metaphysics of cancer, the death grip of practically anything made of plastic, and his need to find the peace and security of family life and decent work.
Yet the redeeming grace was that his concerns, no matter how matted in self-indulgence and hyperbole, were not his alone. Unlike most troubled people. Aquarius could not live life with clenched teeth. He had to swagger and perform because he still was possessed by the vision of changing the consciousness of his time. It was a question of finding its most vital form, of finding something to love beyond an idea or an id