Norman Mailer: His Last Rolling Stone Interview

What was your relationship with the counterculture by 1967? Coming out of the WorldWar II generation, you were a bit older than the people driving the movement.

Let's see, '67, I was forty-four, so, yes, I was older than the counterculture, for sure. You have to understand that the counterculture in away was a very difficult birth, socially speaking, because all through the Fifties we felt we were very few in numbers. These were the Eisenhower years. Comparing him to the presidents that have come since, he wasn't that bad, but at the time,we thought he was awful, because he was so middle-of-the-road American. And we felt the country was ready to explode with all sorts of new ideas and a new mode of perception. It must have been a good eight years — 1965, at least — before the revolution, so called, began. By then, I felt like the dean of that movement. But it wasn't like people were beating a path to my door. I was more of an observer than an adviser.

Did you feel much of a generation gap?

I thought they weren't responsible. You'd hear kids saying, "Let's burn an American flag." Even worse, a rather scurrilous type I knew said, "Let's burn a dog, to show them what it is like burning people in Vietnam." I remember saying to him, "Are you out of your fucking mind? Burn a dog?" But it was typical of the extremity. My generation had come out of the war, feeling on one hand that we had really been involved in a watershed. And on the other hand, as you almost always feel after war, we felt we had been betrayed. We hadn't been in that war to have a cold war following it. So we had roots. We had a historical sense of things. I had the feeling that this new generation was just born out of nowhere. And I also felt that they didn't know what they were doing. On the other hand, it was exciting as hell, because at least finally we were breaking out. But the "we," as I say,was slightly smudged.

What else divided your generations? How about the drug culture?

Well, of course, in the Fifties,we who had been marijuana smokers were very proud of that. And we really felt that marijuana maybe was the secret back route to the revolution. That if everyone was smoking marijuana, we would naturally have a revolution, because when you are on marijuana you can see everything clearly and so forth. I stayed a marijuana smoker until I finally gave it up ten or twenty years later. I felt like you were mortgaging the future with marijuana. You take pot — when I take it, I really have a trip — and I was good for nothing for two days after that. I realized that if I am going to be a serious writer and do a lot of work, I would have to give it up, and did, reluctantly. The younger kids were going on to heavier drugs. I never went near that stuff.

You never tried psychedelic drugs at the time?

Before LSD came along, there was something called, what the hell was it? It began with an "m" — mescaline. I remember taking it once, in New Orleans, and getting very sick, just miserable and then crazy. And I never was tempted to go near the stuff again. And I never really went into LSD. I sort of disapproved of it.

Why?

I felt it was too easy. I have always had this very strong, call it a feeling, call it a prejudice, call it a conviction . . . that the mysteries are not easily available. You have to earn entrance into them. You didn't learn things for too little. You had to pay a price. And I felt that LSD was just blasting superhighways into the mysteries. And what I really didn't like about LSD is that people who were taking it were seeming to become less and less as they took it. They got emptier and more vapid. I always felt Leary really was a sort of bland asshole. What was it: "Turn on, tune in, drop out"? I thought he absolutely was wasting a generation. So I have nothing good to say about him, and I felt that with all the excitement being liberated, there also were some very bad things happening, including the finer sensibilities of a generation being exploited and finally consumed, consumed for too little.

Was rock & roll another dividing point?

Jazz had meant a great deal to me. All through the Fifties I used to go to the Five Spot and hear Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins. They were heroes to me. I felt jazz was an extraordinary opening into, again, the mysteries of modern existence. And I felt rock & roll was just monotonous compared to jazz and never liked it. I always felt like it was taking over and it was the equivalent of LSD in a way. That everything was getting cheapened. I think this is true to this day. We live in a cheaper environment now than we used to.

You wrote about the 1968 political conventions in your book "Miami and the Siege of Chicago." Looking back, what do you think is the legacy of the protests that took place in Chicago that year?

I think that the Democratic party is finally beginning to get off its hands and knees. It has been down there ever since '68. That convention did incredible damage to the Democratic party, because it cleaved the party down the middle — it was almost biblical, in the sense that the waters parted. There were those who were totally opposed to the war in Vietnam and virtually ready to die for their beliefs, and the other half of the party felt, "You guys brought this on us! You wrecked our party!" It was dreadful, and the party has staggered ever since. Sixty-eight was a disaster for the Democrats.

Why do you think this president and this war haven't engendered a comparable level of protest?

Well, it hasn't engendered that level yet because there are a few thousand professional soldiers who are being killed. What do we have, 3,000 professional American soldiers who have been killed? The U.S. casualties in Vietnam were 50,000, and also it was a draft army. But there is a great deal of resentment to [this war]. And the resentment is wholly justified. It is probably the most dastardly war we have ever been in, the most meaningless war, especially when you look back on the stupidity of the brainy people who got us into it, the neo-cons,who really believed it would be easy.

You think this is a more misguided war than Vietnam?

Well,Vietnam was an immensely misguided war for a very simple reason, which is that communism was cannibalistic. There were separate principalities of communism fighting each other, and if we had left it alone, it all would have come apart. But instead, there was a paranoia in American life. The right, very incorrectly, believed that communism was going to take over the entire world. I would say because of Christian bad conscience.

What do you mean by that?

Well, we are not supposed to enrich ourselves, enrich ourselves, enrich ourselves. We are supposed to take care of the poor, if we are good Christians. But in fact there is no such thing as a good Christian. A good Christian is one man and one woman in a thousand. The average Christian is a mixture, like the rest of us, with their good and their bad. And church going Christians have been running America in my lifetime. And they saw communism as the spawn of the devil. They didn't see it as a messed-up system filled with people just like themselves, half-good, half-bad.