Mind of an Outlaw (46 page)

Maybe it was the architecture of the leading church in each town that gave the clue. Plains Baptist Church, now famous for the Sunday Bible classes for men conducted once a month (in his turn) by Jimmy Carter, had a fine architecture within. Painted white, with a ceiling of gracious wooden eaves and two splendid old chairs with red velvet seats on either side of the pulpit, it was an elegant church for a very small town, and its architect, whoever he had been—one could hope it was the town carpenter—must have lived a life that dwelt with ease in the proportions and
needs of ecclesiastical space. The choir sang the hymns and the congregation sang with them, the words full of Christian exaltation, their sword of love quivering in the air, that secret in the strength of Christianity where the steel is smelted from the tears. “I will sing the wondrous story of the Christ who died for me,” went the words, “how He left His home in glory for the cross of Calvary.” When they came to sing “Bringing in the sheaves,” or may it have been “When the roll is called up yonder, I’ll be there,” a member of the choir took out his harmonica and played it with feeling pure enough to take one back to the last campfires of a Confederate Army 111 years gone, the harmonica stirring old river reeds out of the tendrils of the past. It was a fine church service, and it gave the visitor from the North a little too much to think about, especially since he had spent a bemused hour in the basement of Plains Baptist Church somewhat earlier the same Sunday morning taking in Men’s Bible Class 10 to 11
A.M.
The basement, a schoolroom with institutional pale green walls, gray floor, gray metal seats, a blackboard, and a metal table up front for the deacons where Jimmy Carter sat, even an open window on the other side of which a ladder was leaning, had been relatively filled this Sunday with curious visitors, some press and two women from the media who had been allowed, as a political point (in the ongoing epic of women’s liberation), to be admitted. They must have wondered what they were seeing. There was a devotion in the dry little voice, drier than gunpowder, of the deacon who interpreted the Scripture, a farmer or a shopkeeper, thin as jerky dried in the sun, a dry, late-middle-aged man with eyeglasses, hollow cheeks, and an ingrown devotion that resided in the dungeon clamor of his lungs. He spoke in a wispy Georgia snuffle, very hard to hear, and his piety being as close to him as the body of one young beloved clasping the body of another through the night, it was not the place to pull out a pad and start taking notes.

In the second row of seats, the first row being all but empty, sat the real stalwarts of the Bible class, seven or eight big Georgia farmers, pleased by the crowd of visitors in the class, bemused in their own right that the church, the town, the county was a center
suddenly of all the buzzing, insectlike instruments of the media and the peculiar pale faces of the media people. The second row owned the basement. They nudged each other in the ribs as they sat down next to one another. “Didn’t see you sneak in here,” they said to each other. They were the meat and mind of the South. They looked as if they had been coming here fifty Sundays a year for twenty years, here to think whatever thoughts they had on such occasions—one might be better situated to read the minds of Martians—and they were impressive in their mixture of hardworking bodies and hardworking hands, red necks with work-wrinkle lines three-sixteenths of an inch deep, and the classic ears of Southern farmers, big ears with large flappy chewed-out lobes as if they had been pulled on like old dugs over the ten thousand problems of their years. Men’s Bible class was teaching that Christian love was unselfish devotion to the highest good of others, and up front Jimmy Carter sat silently at the metal table with a couple of other deacons, his face calm, his mind attentive to one knew not necessarily what, dressed in a gray-blue suit and harmonious tie, and the hour passed and it was time to go upstairs to eleven o’clock service.

Somewhere the yeast must have been working in the religious call, for in the early afternoon, a couple of hours after church, when his private interview with Jimmy Carter took place, it proved to be the oddest professional hour Norman Mailer ever spent with a politician—it must have seemed twice as odd to Carter. In retrospect, it quickly proved mortifying (no lesser word will do), since to his embarrassment, Mailer did too much of the talking. Perhaps he had hoped to prime Carter to the point where they could have a conversation, but the subject he chose to bring up was religion, and that was ill-chosen. A man running for president could comment about Christ, he could comment a little, but he could hardly afford to be too enthusiastic. Religion had become as indecent a topic to many a contemporary American as sex must have been in the nineteenth century. If half the middle-class people in the Victorian period held almost no conscious thoughts about sex, the same could now be said of religion, except it might be even more costly to
talk about than sex, because religious conversations invariably sound insane when recounted to men or women who never feel such sentiments. Since it was a safe assumption that half of America lived at present in the nineteenth century and half in the twentieth, a journalist who had any respect for the candidate he was talking to would not ask an opinion on sex or religion. Still, Mailer persisted. He was excited about Carter’s theological convictions. He wanted to hear more of them. He had read the transcript of Bill Moyers’s one-hour TV interview with Carter (“People and Politics,” May 6, 10:00
P.M.
, Public Broadcasting Service) and had been impressed with a few of Carter’s remarks, particularly his reply to Moyers’s question “What drives you?”

After a long silence Carter had said, “I don’t know … exactly how to express it … I feel I have one life to live. I feel that God wants me to do the best I can with it. And that’s quite often my major prayer. Let me live my life so that it will be meaningful.” A little later he would add, “When I have a sense of peace and self-assurance … that what I’m doing is the right thing, I assume, maybe in an unwarranted way, that that’s doing God’s will.”

These were hardly historic remarks, and yet on reflection they were certainly remarkable. There was a maw of practicality that engulfed presidents and presidential candidates alike. They lived in all those supermarkets of the mind where facts are stacked like cans; whether good men or bad, they were hardly likely to be part of that quintessential elevation of mind that can allow a man to say, “Let me live my life so that it will be meaningful.” It was in the nature of politicians to look for
programs
to be meaningful, not the psychic substance of their lives. Reading the Moyers interview shortly before leaving for Plains must therefore have excited a last-minute excess of curiosity about Carter, and that was last-minute to be certain. Through all of the political spring when candidates came and went, Mailer had not gone near the primary campaigns. Working on a novel, he had made the whole decision not to get close to any of it. One didn’t try to write seriously about two things at once. Besides, it was hard to tell much about Carter. Mailer thought the media had an inbuilt deflection that kept them from perceiving what was truly interesting
in any new phenomenon. Since he rarely watched television any longer, he did not even know what Carter’s voice was like, and photographs proved subtly anonymous. Still, he kept reading about Carter. In answer to the people who would ask, “What do you think of
him
?” Mailer would be quick to reply, “I suspect he’s a political genius.” It was all he knew about Carter, but he knew that much.

He also had to admit he enjoyed Carter’s reaction to meeting Nixon and Agnew, McGovern and Henry Jackson, Hubert Humphrey, George Wallace, Ronald Reagan, Nelson Rockefeller, Ed Muskie. Carter confessed he had not been impressed sufficiently to think these men were better qualified to run the country than himself. Mailer understood such arrogance. He had, after all, felt enough of the same on meeting famous politicians to also think himself equipped for office, and had been brash enough to run for mayor of New York in a Democratic primary. Mailer had always assumed he would be sensational as a political candidate; he learned, however, that campaign work ran eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, and after a while it was not yourself who was the candidate but 50 percent of yourself. Before it was over, his belly was drooping—one’s gut is the first to revolt against giving the same speech eight times a day. He came in fourth in a field of five, and was left with a respect for successful politicians. They were at least entitled to the same regard one would offer a professional athlete for his stamina. Later, brooding on the size of a conceit that had let him hope he could steal an election from veteran Democrats, Mailer would summarize his experience with the wise remark, “A freshman doesn’t get elected president of the fraternity.”

But Carter had. Carter must be a political genius. Nonetheless, Mailer felt a surprising lack of curiosity. Genius in politics did not interest him that much. He thought politics was a dance where you need not do more than move from right to left and left to right while evading the full focus of the media. The skill was in the timing. You tried to move to the left at that moment when you would lose the least on the right; to the right, when the damage would be smallest on the left. You had to know how to
steer in and out of other news stories. It was a difficult skill, but hardly possessed of that upper aesthetic which would insist skill be illumined by a higher principle—whether elegance, courage, compassion, taste, or the eminence of wit. Politics called for some of the same skills you needed in inventing a new plastic. Politics called to that promiscuous material in the personality which could flow into many a form. Sometimes Mailer suspected that the flesh of the true politician would yet prove nonbiodegradable and fail to molder in the grave!

Still, there was no question in his mind that he would vote for Carter. In 1976 he was ready to vote for many a Democrat. It was not that Mailer could not ever necessarily vote for a Republican, but after eight years of Nixon and Ford, he thought the country could use a Democratic administration again. It was not that Ford was unendurable. Like a moderately dull marriage, Ford was endlessly endurable—one could even get fond of him in a sour way. Jerry Ford, after all, provided the clue to how America had moved in fifty years from George Babbitt to Jerry Ford. He even offered the peculiar security of having been shaped by forces larger than himself. Maybe that was why Ford’s face suggested he would do the best he could with each problem as he perceived it: “Don’t worry about me,” said his face, “I’m not the least bit dialectical.”

Of course, the president was only a handmaiden to the corporate spirit. The real question was whether the White House could afford another four years of the corporate spirit, that immeasurably self-satisfied public spirit whose natural impulse was to cheat on the environment and enrich the rich.

It was certainly time for the Democrats. He would probably vote for any Democrat who got the nomination. Nonetheless, it was irritating to have so incomplete an idea of Carter, to be so empty of any thesis as to whether he might be deemed ruthless, a computer, or saintly.

A day earlier, on the press plane to Albany, Georgia, he had felt—what with a few drinks inside him—that he was coming
closer to what he wanted to discuss with Carter in the interview that would be granted next day. The sexual revolution had come out of a profound rejection of the American family—it had been a way of saying to the parents, “If you say sex is dirty, then it has to be good, because your lives are false!” But Carter would restore the family. Faithful, by public admission, to his wife for thirty years, he was in every way a sexual conservative. Since his economic proposals would appeal to progressives, he might be undertaking the Napoleonic proposition of outflanking two armies, Republicans and Democrats, from the right and the left. Yes, there was much to talk about with Carter. Even on the airplane, Mailer could feel his head getting overcompressed with themes of conversation arriving too early.

Jimmy Carter’s home was on a side street, and you approached it through a barricade the Secret Service had erected. It was possible this was as unobtrusive a small-town street as the Secret Service had ever converted into an electronic compound with walkie-talkies, sentries, and lines of sight. The house was in a grove of trees, and the ground was hard-put to keep its grass, what with pine needles, pecan leaves, and the clay of the soil itself, which gave off a sandy-rose hue in the shade.

The rambling suburban ranch house in those trees spoke of California ancestry for its architecture, and a cost of construction between $50,000 and $100,000, depending on how recently it was built. The inside of the house was neither lavish nor under-furnished, not sumptuous or mean—a house that spoke of comfort more than taste. The colors laid next to one another were in no way brilliant, yet neither did their palette of soft shades depress the eye, for they were cool in the Georgia summer. Carter’s study was large and dark with books, and there were busts of Kennedy and Lincoln, and his eight-year-old daughter Amy’s comic book (starring Blondie) was on the floor. It was the only spot of red in all the room. Over his desk was a fluorescent light.

Maybe Carter was one of the few people in the world who could look good under fluorescent light. Wearing a pale blue
button-down shirt open at the neck—pale blue was certainly his color—Carter had a quintessential American cleanliness, that silvery light of a finely tuned and supple rectitude that produces our best ministers and best generals alike, responsible for both the bogs of Vietnam and the vision of a nobler justice.

Now, sitting across the desk from Carter, he was struck by a quiet difference in Carter this Sunday afternoon. Maybe it was the result of church, or maybe the peril implicit for a politician in any interview—since one maladroit phrase can ruin a hundred good ones—but Carter seemed less generous than he had expected. Of course, Mailer soon knew to his horror that he was close to making a fool of himself, if indeed he had not done it already, because with his first question taking five minutes to pose, and then ten, he had already given a speech rather than a question. What anguish this caused, that he—known as criminally egomaniacal by common reputation, and therefore for years as careful as a reformed criminal to counteract the public expectation of him—was haranguing a future president of the United States. He had a quick recollection of the days when he ran for mayor and some fool or other, often an overly educated European newspaperman, would ask questions that consisted of nothing but long-suppressed monologues. To make matters worse, Carter was hardly being responsive in his answer—how could he be? Mailer’s exposition dwelt in the bowels of that limitless schism in Protestantism—between the fundamental simplicities of good moral life as exemplified a few hours ago in Bible class and the insuperable complexities of moral examination opened by Kierkegaard, whose work, Mailer now told Carter with enthusiasm, looked to demonstrate that we cannot know the moral role we enact. We can feel saintly and yet be evil in the eyes of God, feel we are evil (on the other hand) and yet be more saintly than we expect; equally, we may do good even as we are feeling good, or be bad exactly when we expect we are bad. Man is alienated from his capacity to decide his moral worth. Maybe, Mailer suggested, he had sailed on such a quick theological course because Carter had quoted Kierkegaard on the second page of his autobiography. “Every man is an exception,” Kierkegaard had written.