Einstein of the Mediocre

By R.Z. Sheppard

ST. GEORGE AND THE GODFATHER by NORMAN MAILER 229 pages. Signet. $1.50 (paperback).

Aquarius, the water bearer, has gone to the well once more. This time he is in Miami Beach, a few miles south of Cape Kennedy, site of his devil hunt in Of a Fire on the Moon. In the retirement capital of the world, Norman Mailer is on familiar ground. He has already freelanced his way through three national conventions, most tellingly at the street brawls in Chicago in 1968.

Observing the national conventions this year did not offer Norman Mailer the physical perils or intellectual brinks he has relished in the past. That turns out to be a good thing. There is not nearly so much of what he calls his "ego liberation"--those warm-up exercises and public temperature takings that have long since turned into self-parody. Mailer can get right down to the business of sniffing out the true spirit of the occasion. The result is that St. George and the Godfather (much of which originally appeared in LIFE) is a very brisk report on the dull goings on at Miami Beach.

Mailer relies at least as much on his legs as he does on his punch. He attends the arrivals of the candidates; he noses around the caucus meetings for color or the lack of it. There are even a few side trips. Like a true politician, Mailer does not miss the opportunity to continue his attack on Women's Liberation. Like a celebrity chaser, he goes to the White House to interview Henry Kissinger, who easily wraps Mailer round his finger. But mostly Mailer does what Mailer does best: tossing out metaphors, similes and off-cuff vignettes --usually making them stick.

There is Hubert Humphrey, "a Renaissance priest of the Vatican who could not even cross a marble floor without pieties issuing from his skirt." Ed Muskie, "a gentleman of the frontier out of the 19th century," ignominiously boxed between the new politics and the press. "Nobody," adds Mailer, "forgives a favorite who loses by seven lengths."

Only Eugene McCarthy possesses the complexity and style that truly appeal to Mailer. McCarthy is the witty "philosopher prince" who shares the author's love of language. "I like McGov-ern," says Mailer, "but I just wish he spoke with a little metaphor from time to time." "Methodists are not much on metaphor," replies McCarthy.

McGovern strikes Mailer as a thoroughly decent man--if not quite the St. George of the book's title then at least a minister of one of the two political parties that Mailer sees as possibly "the true churches of America." Yet McGovern and his followers have for Mailer both an unbecoming air of innocence and an insufficiency of evil. In Mailerian terms, this usually means a lack of recognition of the demoniac part of human nature.

A few weeks later at the Republican convention he finds all the demoniac presences he can handle. Unlike most Democrats, Mailer was not turned off by the G.O.P.'s carefully scripted agenda. In the stockholder-meeting monotony and evasive efficiency Mailer perceives the highest expression of Richard Nixon's political genius. In fact, says Mailer, if it were not for the bombing in Southeast Asia he would seriously have to consider voting for the President.

Awe. A good part of this attitude is Mailer's obvious awe of power and respect for professionalism, wherever found. But Nixon is even more in Mailer's eyes, not merely a political genius but an artist of the banal, "the Einstein of the mediocre and the inert." In an astute account of the psychological balance-sheet, Mailer sees that one egg thrown at a Republican matron by an antiwar demonstrator "can mop up the guilt of five hundred bombs" dropped on Viet Nam.

Elsewhere he marvels at the way the Republicans filled the TV screen with nonevents, all the while knowing that "The Wad," as he calls the general public, will always watch something rather than nothing--and indeed be soothed by it. Mailer seems both fascinated by and resigned to the power of mass noncommunication. He even offers the possibility that Esso is changing its name to Exxon because it sounds like Nixon. This seems farfetched, although one recalls that 20 years ago Mr. Clean was created to resemble President Eisenhower.

But more than anything else Mailer captures an atmosphere at the Republican national convention that resembles the eerie stillness at the eye of a hurricane. There Nixon, the complete centrist, rules by relocating his middle as the storm around him changes direction. "

.R.Z. Sheppard

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.