[2 - THE PRECURSORS - NORMAN MAILER, THE WHITE NEGRO]

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01314R000300300018-1
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 5
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 23, 2004
• Sequence Number: 18
• Content Type: BOOK

SOC_ x-1.01. t U~ 1a4e0C9re
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... these have been the years of conformity and depres-
sion. A stench of fear has come out of every pore of
American life, and we suffer from a collective failure of
nerve. The only courage, with rare exceptions, that we
have been witness to, has been the isolated courage of
'isolated people.
- NORMAN MAILER, The White Negro
lien the Village
Voice arrived in
Greenwich Village
in October 1955,
that stench of fear still hung in the
air. The first issue contained a banal
melange of community news, art
features and movie reviews, but the
paper did chance to have a cover
story on folk singers in Washington
Square. Folk singers were suspect.
"The day the Voice hit the street
everyone said, `It's a Communist
paper,' " says John Wilcock, the first
news editor and later editor of sev-
eral underground papers. "It was
absurd, but because of the deep fears
in American life after the McCarthy
period, the Voice got the reputation
for being a far-out, freaky paper.
Almost despite itself the paper ended
up the grandfather of the under-
ground press."
The Voice never pretended to be
a radical paper. Instead, the paper
focused on what Ed Fancher, the
publisher, called the "revolt of the
orbs"-the struggle to preserve parks,
playgrounds, the precious character
of the Village, against city planners
and real-estate interests.' There was
a delicious melancholy in these futile
fire fights against the steel-and-con-
crete monsters of modernity. Indeed,
from early on nostalgia seemed to
sink into the very paper on which
the Voice was printed, a nostalgia
symbolized by the Christopher Street
office, a quaint wooden structure that
might have been built for the arche-
typal crusading nineteenth-century
newspaper.
The paper's founders had no ink-
ling of the cultural and political
upheaval that was shortly to engulf
the United States. After all, in the
mid-fifties the cultural and political
Left were in disarray, garbed in sack-
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22 THE PAPER REVOLUTIONARIES
cloth. C. Wright Mills stood largely
ignored, an almost desperate figure.
The few thousand Beats of the cul-
tural Left appeared no less desperate
and isolated; antipolitical, they did
not traffic with the old Left. Gary
Snyder-poet, Beat, hippie, Zen mas-
ter-recalls the "sense of antagonism,
hostility and paranoia which went
through the fifties with an accom-
panying self-destructiveness, a tend-
ency toward alcoholism or heroin
addiction, suicide, and a kind of
romantic mystery of self-destruction,
so that it was tragically beautiful
to see someone go down through
drug addiction." 2 There were no
exits. "Against the ruin of the world,
there is only one defense, the crea-
tive act," 3 wrote Kenneth Rexroth.
The few politically radical pub-
lications of the time certainly did
not inspire- particular enthusiasm.
The National Guardian, begun in
1948 as a spokesman for Henry Wal-
lace's Presidential campaign, plugged
along, supported largely by scattered
Communists and fellow travelers. Dis-
sent, started in 1956 by Social Dem-
ocrats, addressed an aging, predomi-
nantly New York City audience. I.F.
Stone's Weekly and A.J. Muste's Lib-
eration were small and largely un-
noticed.
Of course, no "serious" radical
paid any attention to the scores of
little magazines that about this time
began appearing, disappearing, reap-
pearing in Bohemian districts across
America-Beatitude in San Francisco;
Combustion in Toronto; Big Table;
Kulchur; Intercourse; C; My Own
Magazine.
The contributors to these maga-
zines were "knights of the human
spirit" who would wage "a sort of
guerrilla warfare . . . against the
organized forces of befuddlement,"
wrote Beatitude. "The brave com-
mandos, Ginsberg Kerouac Rexroth
k al versus the Hearse Press, the
Loose Enterprises, and so forth, who
have all but succeeded in stifling
the human spirit." 4 Few in those
Eisenhower years cared to join in
such an irreverent, full-scale attack.
on American life. But by the early
1960's the whole tenor of the maga-
zines was changing. The minuscule
circulations still suggested that they
were little more than the "ethnic"
journals of a small Bohemian sect,
but the writers and artists them-
selves could feel the first tremors
of a broad political and cultural
upheaval. Many of the magazines
grew optimistic, even cocky. They
began to deal openly with political
issues. Ed Sanders' Fuck You/A
Magazine of the Arts, declared itself
dedicated to "pacifism, national de-
fense through nonviolent resistance,
unilateral' disarmament, multilateral
indiscriminate apertural conjugation,
anarchism, world federalism, civil
disobedience, obstructors and sub-
marine boarders, peace eye, the
gleaming crotch lake of the universe,
the witness of the flaming ra-cock
. . . mystical bands of peace-work
stompers, total-assault guerrilla ejac-
ulators, the Lower East Side tneshu-
gana.s, vaginal zapping, the LSD com-
munarium, God through cannabis,
hashish forever, and all those groped
by J. Edgar Hoover in the silent
halls of Congress." s
The Voice could hardly ignore
this fledgling movement, and slowly
the paper turned away from such
typical early articles as "What Men
Think of the Greenwich Village Fe-
male" and "What Women Think of
the Greenwich Village Male" toward
accounts of off-Broadway theater,
eign and underground films,
Kerouac and the Beats, Allen
berg, Lenny Bruce, new pol
dope, folk music-the first numb
of it radical-youth culture.
The old forms and formula
the newspaper craft could not 1
to capture the subtlety and
plexity of this new world in
making, and by the early 1960':
Voice had forged it new literary
nalism, personal yet detached,
cerned yet cynical, detailed yc
lective-a style that has affect
generation of journalists and wr
Sometimes the Style didn't rise?a
cocktail-party chitchat, treating
tics as nothing more than an er
parade of personalities, and ti culture into narrow cult. At its
though, a Voice article could ca
the essence of an event in a
subtle images and descriptions
instance, in the late 1950's, He
Smith, now a Voice columnist,
about an evening when Jack Ker
the then newly famous author c
the Road, read his poetry it
Village Vanguard:
... He reads fast with his eyes tl
cally glued to the little pad, rapid.
and on as if he wants to get it ovc
"I'll read a junky poem." He slur
the beautiful passages as if not exl,
the crowd to dig them, even if ht
slnwcr. "It's like kissing my k
belly . . ." He begins to loosen v
ad lib, and the audience is with 1
fast 15 minutes and he's done. T
plause is like a thunderstorm on
July night. He smiles and goes
among the wheels and the agent
pulls a relaxed drag on his cigaret
is prince of the hips being accel:
the court of the rich kings, wi
months ago, would have nudge
closer to the bar, if lie wanderct:
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u counts of off-Broadway theater, for-
:in(.[ underground films, jack
Kerouac and the Beats, Allen
Gins- Lenny Bruce, new politics,
dope, folk music-the first rumblings
>f .,t radical-youth culture.
The old forms and formulas of
the newspaper craft could not begin
to capture the subtlety and cotn-
l,lexity of this new world in the
making, and by the early 1960's the
1'oicc had forged a new literary jour-
nalism, personal yet detached, con-
cerned yet cynical, detailed yet se-
lective-a style that has affected a
generation of journalists and. writers.
Sometimes the style didn't rise above
cocktail-party chitchat, treating poli-
tics as nothing more.than an endless
parade of personalities, and turning
culture into narrow cult. At its best,
though, a Voice article could capture
the essence of an event in a few
subtle images and descriptions. For
instance, in the late 1950's, Howard
Smith, now a Voice columnist, wrote
about an evening when Jack Kerouac,
the then newly famous author of On
the Road, read his poetry in the
Village Vanguard:
. . He reads fast with his eyes theatri-
cally glued to the little pad, rapidly, on
and on as if he wants to get it over with.
"I'll read a junky poem." He slurs over
the beautiful passages as if not expecting
the crowd to dig them, even if he went
slower. "I't's like kissing my kitten's
belly . . ." He begins to loosen up and
ad lib, and the audience is with him. A
fast 15 minutes and lie's (lone. The ap-
plause is like a thunderstorm on a hot
July night. He smiles and goes to sit
among the wheels and the agents, and
pulls a relaxed drag on his cigarette. He
is prince of the hips being accepted in
the court of the rich kings, who, six
months ago, would have nudged him
closer to the bar, if he wandered in to
watch the show. He must have hated
himself in the morning-not for the
drinks lie had, but because he ate it all
up the way he really never wanted to.
As I was leaving, some guy in an old
Army shirt, standing close to the bar,
remarked: ' Well, Kerouac Caine off the
road in high gear. . . . I hope he has a
good set of snow tires." 6
The Voice had only just become
a moderate success when, in 1958,
twenty-six-year-old Paul Krassner
began publishing the Realist, the
other 1950's publication, whose style
and content foreshadowed the under-
ground press. The six hundred orig-
inal subscribers thought they were
getting a magazine of high-minded
atheism and anticlericalism. But
Krassner, who had been a minor
comedian patterning his routines on
the dark, ironic humor of Lenny
Bruce and Mort Sahl, soon changed
all that. Even the first (June-.July)
issue displayed the sense of irrever-
ence, iconoclasm and (for that era)
just plain bad taste, for which
Krassner and the Realist would soon.
be notorious. Most of the articles
were couched in the quasi-academic
style that had long afflicted "maga-
zines of thought." However, Krassner
couldn't resist injecting satire into
the headlines-"Sodomy in Kilts"
over a serious piece on the liberaliza-
tion of Scottish laws against homo-
sexuality; "Ts He a Good Guy or a
Bad Guy? Or What Makes Wyatt
Urp" above an article attacking
'Thomas Wyatt, a prominent faith
healer. Even more significantly Krass-
ner contributed a "Diabolical Dia-
logue" between John Foster Dulles
and Bertrand Russell, the first of
many imaginary discussions between
famous people that would appear in
the Realist, blurring the distinction
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24 THE PAPER REVOLUTIONARIES
between fact and fiction:
DULLES: . . . and so in the interest of
maintaining friendly Anglo-American
relations, I've come to ask you to stop
harping about H-bomb tests. You're
only aiding the Communist cause.
RUSSELL: Nonsense. I'm opposed to all
forms of totalitarianism.
DULLES: But suppose that the Com-
munists come out in favor of deep
breathing .. .
By the early 1960's Krassner had
completely jettisoned the Realist's
fundamentalist atheism and turned
the magazine into a meld of often
"unprintable," inevitably unpredict-
able articles and satire. Nowhere else
could one read a piece by a seven-
teen-year-old boy on why he was a
Nazi (or was it satire?); a fake letter
from Billy Graham (it did seem real).;
satirical accounts of Luci Johnson's
wedding night and John F. Ken-
nedy's first wife (but there's a ring
of truth to it). Krassner made no
attempt to label what was "real" and
what wasn't, and that uncertainty
made the Realist even more outra-
geous and irritating.
"I wanted to blow peoples'
minds," Krassner says, "and it's really
a mind blower if you can't tell if
-something is real or not. Moreover,
if a satire's possible it says something
about the way things are. Several
years ago, I had a serious article by
a student at Berkeley about the vio-
lent peace movement. But people
thought: it was satire, and dangerous
satire at that. Then we had a cartoon
that showed a soldier with a bayonet
saying to a pregnant Vietnamese
woman, 'Is there a Viet Cong in
there?' It was a prediction of the
Song My massacre. Then, too, it was
true. She was hiding a Viet Gong in
there!
"Then I began to mix and play
with satire and fact. When I de-
scribed Tim Leary's psychedelic cen-
ter at Millbrook, I described actual-
ity. There was a psychedelic Burma
Shave sign outside that said 'What
is, is within.' Inside there was a copy
of Scientific American on the table
right next to the Bible. Upstairs I
described how there was a bulletin
board with a list of all the guides
with stars pasted next to their names
according to how far they had tran-
scended their ego. Now that last bit
about the stars I made up, but it
was a way-a vehicle-to make an
observation that those people were
hung up on that. And because it
was believed it said something."
Here in the early 1960's the high-
school=civics-textbook image of Amex-
ican life was disintegrating before
the very eyes of the young, and the
tools of conventional journalism just
were not calibrated closely enough to
capture the subtlety, irony and pathos
of that process. In 1946 George Or-
well had already noted how politi-
cians and political writers were de-
basing language to avoid dealing
with the realities of the modern
world:
In our time, political speech and writ.
ing are largely the defense of the inde-
fensible. Things like the continuance of
British rule in India, the Russian purges
and deportations, the dropping of the
atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be
defended, but only by arguments which
are too brutal for most people to face,
and which do not square with the pro-
fessed aims of political parties. Thus,
political language has to consist largely
of euphemism, question-begging and
slicer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless vil-
lages are bombarded from the air, the
inhabitants driven out into the country-
side, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts
set on fire with incendiary bullets; this is
called pacification. Millions of peasants
are robbed of their farms and sent trudg-
ing along the roads with no more than
they can carry: this is called transfer of
population or rectification of frontiers.7
Today the aboveground journal-
ist is often merely a scribe. He copies
verbatim the government's most du-
bious proclamations, and crops them
down into neat, palatable news
stories or one-minute TV spots. And
he peddles this to the American
public as "objective journalism." He
is a willing dupe, too, for the forms
of conventional journalism cannot
begin to capture the "objective" re-
alities of modern American life. After
all, conventional journalism is the
craft of accurately transmitting what
frequently is only half understood or
ultimately unintelligible. There is no
room for irony, satire, black humor
or sheer disbelief. There is no room
for. any of Krassner's crude, inele-
gant, irreverent, outrageous tech-
niques-techniques that are a part of
what would be needed in a journal-
ism that could understand this new
world.
The Realist, itself, represents no
full vision of an alternative medium.
Krassner-publisher, editor, top ba-
nana-is the Realist, and the maga-
zine rests as much in the older
tradition of one-man iconoclastic
journalism (George Seldes' In Fact;
Lyle Stuart's The Independent) as
in the newer patterns of underground
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are too brutal for most people to face,
and which do not square with the pro-
fessed aims of political parties. Thus,
political language has to consist largely
of euphemism, question-begging and
slicer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless vil-
lages are bombarded from the air, the
inhabitants driven out into the country-
side, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts
set on fire with incendiary bullets; this is
called pacification. Millions of peasants
are robbed of their farms and sent trudg-
ing along the roads with no more than
they can carry: this is called transfer of
population or rectification of frontiers.7
Today the aboveground journal-
ist is often merely a scribe. He copies
verbatim the government's most du-
bious proclamations, and crops them
down into neat, palatable news
stories or one-minute TV spots. And
he peddles this to the American
public as "objective journalism." He
is a willing dupe, too, for the forms
of conventional journalism cannot
begin to capture the "objective" re-
alities of modern American life. After
all, conventional journalism is the
craft of accurately transmitting what
frequently is only half understood or
ultimately unintelligible. There is no
room for irony, satire, black humor
or sheeir disbelief. There is no room
for any of Krassner's crude, inele-
gant, irreverent, outrageous tech-
niques--techniques that are a part of
what would be needed in a journal-
ism that could understand this new
world.
The Realist, itself, represents no
full vision of an alternative medium.
Krassner-publisher, editor, top ba-
nana-is the Realist, and the maga-
zine rests as much in the older
tradition of one-man iconoclastic
journalism (George Seldes' In Fact;
Lyle Stuart's The Independent) as
in the newer patterns of underground
journalism. The Realist has remained
limited by the borders of Krassner's
mind-a wickedly original mind at
that, zipping recklessly across the
boundaries of the acceptable and the
conventionally sane-but nevertheless
the mind of one lone man. Krassner
himself has become very much a part
of the Movement, but by the last
half of the 1960's, with the United
States engaged in Indochina in what
the left-liberal community considered
a monstrous and immoral effort, and
which, as the months and the excuses
and the casualties mounted, appeared
less a temporary aberration than a
logical culmination, his satire in the
Realist was having no more impact
than a water pistol.
The Village Voice, for its part,
never tried to bedeck itself with love
beads and psychedelic drawings, or
clenched fists and militant art, and
has stayed very much an observer of
the cultural and political revolt. The
paper has stayed unashamedly a
commercial enterprise as well, and
an extremely lucrative one at that.
It has no pretensions to being a
part of the Movement and inhabits
a no-man's land between the Estab-
lishment and radical media. Because
of this the Voice's writers often sound
estranged from the world they ob-
serve, writing with "intimate" de-
tachment or else turning out highly
personal, rambling essays that suggest
that they and the universe are equals.
Some of the paper's coverage-say, a
Newfield piece on prisons or a Hen-
toff story on the meaning of the Chi-
cago conspiracy trial-still has a vigor
and energy found nowhere else in
New York journalism, but the Voice
as a whole has grown further and
further removed from the hot and
turbulent centers of the Movement.
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