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For many, the moon landing was the defining event of the twentieth century. So it seems only fitting that Norman Mailer—the literary provocateur who altered the landscape of American nonfiction—wrote the most wide-ranging, far-seeing chronicle of the Apollo 11 mission. A classic chronicle of America’s reach for greatness in the midst of the Cold War, Of a Fire on the Moon compiles the reportage Mailer published between 1969 and 1970 in Life magazine: gripping firsthand dispatches from inside NASA’s clandestine operations in Houston and Cape Kennedy; technical insights into the magnitude of their awe-inspiring feat; and prescient meditations that place the event in human context as only Mailer could.
Praise for Of a Fire on the Moon
“The gift of a genius . . . a twentieth-century American epic—a Moby Dick of space.”—New York
“Mailer’s account of Apollo 11 stands as a stunning image of human energy and purposefulness. . . . It is an act of revelation—the only verbal deed to be worthy of the dream and the reality it celebrates.”—Saturday Review
“A wild and dazzling book.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Still the most challenging and stimulating account of [the] mission to appear in print.”—The Washington Post
Praise for Norman Mailer
“[Norman Mailer] loomed over American letters longer and larger than any other writer of his generation.”—The New York Times
“A writer of the greatest and most reckless talent.”—The New Yorker
“Mailer is indispensable, an American treasure.”—The Washington Post
“A devastatingly alive and original creative mind.”—Life
“Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance.”—The New York Review of Books
“The largest mind and imagination [in modern] American literature . . . Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book.”—Chicago Tribune
“Mailer is a master of his craft. His language carries you through the story like a leaf on a stream.”—The Cincinnati Post
- Sales Rank: #456151 in Books
- Published on: 2014-06-03
- Released on: 2014-06-03
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.99" h x .99" w x 5.16" l, .75 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 480 pages
Review
Praise for Of a Fire on the Moon
“The gift of a genius . . . a twentieth-century American epic—a Moby Dick of space.”—New York
“Mailer’s account of Apollo 11 stands as a stunning image of human energy and purposefulness. . . . It is an act of revelation—the only verbal deed to be worthy of the dream and the reality it celebrates.”—Saturday Review
“A wild and dazzling book.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Still the most challenging and stimulating account of [the] mission to appear in print.”—The Washington Post
Praise for Norman Mailer
“[Norman Mailer] loomed over American letters longer and larger than any other writer of his generation.”—The New York Times
“A writer of the greatest and most reckless talent.”—The New Yorker
“Mailer is indispensable, an American treasure.”—The Washington Post
“A devastatingly alive and original creative mind.”—Life
“Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance.”—The New York Review of Books
“The largest mind and imagination [in modern] American literature . . . Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book.”—Chicago Tribune
“Mailer is a master of his craft. His language carries you through the story like a leaf on a stream.”—The Cincinnati Post
About the Author
Born in 1923 in Long Branch, New Jersey, and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Norman Mailer was one of the most influential writers of the second half of the twentieth century and a leading public intellectual for nearly sixty years. He is the author of more than thirty books. The Castle in the Forest, his last novel, was his eleventh New York Times bestseller. His first novel, The Naked and the Dead, has never gone out of print. His 1968 nonfiction narrative, The Armies of the Night, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He won a second Pulitzer for The Executioner’s Song and is the only person to have won Pulitzers in both fiction and nonfiction. Five of his books were nominated for National Book Awards, and he won a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation in 2005. Mr. Mailer died in 2007 in New York City.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
CHAPTER 1
A Loss of Ego
Now sleeps he with that old whore death . . . Do thee take this old whore death for thy lawful wedded wife?
Ernest Hemingway
Norman, born sign of Aquarius, had been in Mexico when the news came about Hemingway. He had gone through the New York Times to read the well-turned remarks of notables who for the most part had never cared about Papa, not that much! and had one full heart-clot of outraged vanity that the Times never thought to ask his opinion. In fact, he was not certain he could have given it. He was sick in that miasmal and not quite discoverable region between the liver and the soul. Hemingway’s suicide left him wedded to horror. It is possible that in the eight years since, he never had a day which was completely free of thoughts of death.
Of course, he finally gave a statement. His fury that the world was not run so well as he could run it encouraged him to speak. The world could always learn from what he had to say--his confidence was built on just so hard a diamond. Besides, a British lady columnist passing through Mexico with him thought it would be appropriate to get his remarks on the demise. This, after all, was special stuff--the reactions of one of America’s best-known young novelists would certainly be appropriate to the tragic finale of America’s greatest living writer. So with thoughts of Hemingway’s brain scattered now in every atmosphere--what a curse to put upon his followers!--Norman coughed up what was in effect a political statement. He had no taste in such matters, and a pedagogic voice for public remarks; leave it that he inveighed gracelessly on how the death would put secret cheer in every bureaucrat’s heart for they would be stronger now. He had, of course, been thinking that Hemingway constituted the walls of the fort: Hemingway had given the power to believe you could still shout down the corridor of the hospital, live next to the breath of the beast, accept your portion of dread each day. Now the greatest living romantic was dead. Dread was loose. The giant had not paid his dues, and something awful was in the air. Technology would fill the pause. Into the silences static would enter. It was conceivable that man was no longer ready to share the dread of the Lord.
II
Are we poised for a philosophical launch? There may be no way to do anything less. We will be trying after all to comprehend the astronauts. If we approach our subject via Aquarius, it is because he is a detective of sorts, and different in spirit from eight years ago. He has learned to live with questions. Of course, as always, he has little to do with the immediate spirit of the time. Which is why Norman on this occasion wonders if he may call himself Aquarius. Born January 31, he is entitled to the name, but he thinks it a fine irony that we now enter the Age of Aquarius since he has never had less sense of possessing the age. He feels in fact little more than a decent spirit, somewhat shunted to the side. It is the best possible position for detective work.
Forgive him, then, if he takes mild pleasure in conjunction of dates. John F. Kennedy had made his declaration concerning the moon not six weeks before Hemingway was dead. The nation, Kennedy decided, “should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. . . . This is a new ocean, and I believe the United States must sail upon it.” Presumably, the moon was not listening, but if, in fact, she were the receiving and transmitting station of all lunacy, then she had not been ignoring the nation since. Four assassinations later; a war in Vietnam later; a burning of Black ghettos later; hippies, drugs and many student uprisings later; one Democratic Convention in Chicago seven years later; one New York school strike later; one sexual revolution later; yes, eight years of a dramatic, near-catastrophic, outright spooky decade later, we were ready to make the moon. It was a decade so unbalanced in relation to previous American history that Aquarius, who had begun it by stabbing his second wife in 1960, was to finish by running in a Democratic Primary for Mayor of New York during the hottest May and June he could ever recall. In sixty days he must have made three hundred speeches, he appeared on more radio and television than he could remember, walked streets, shook hands, sometimes two or three thousand hands a day, worked fourteen hours a day, often sixteen, went on four and five hours sleep, and awoke on many a morning with the clear and present certainty that he was going to win. Norman was lazy, and politics would make him work for sixteen hours a day the rest of his life. He was so guilty a man that he thought he would be elected as a fit and proper punishment for his sins. Still, he also wanted to win. He would never write again if he were Mayor (the job would doubtless strain his talent to extinction) but he would have his hand on the rump of History, and Norman was not without such lust.
He came in fourth in a field of five, and politics was behind him. He had run, when he considered it, no very remarkable race. He had obviously not had any apocalyptic ability to rustle up huge numbers of votes. He had in fact been left with a huge boredom about himself. He was weary of his own voice, own face, person, persona, will, ideas, speeches, and general sense of importance. He felt not unhappy, mildly depressed, somewhat used up, wise, tolerant, sad, void of vanity, even had a hint of humility. Somewhat disembodied spirit. He burned something in his soul those eight weeks of campaigning, but he was not certain just what he might have squandered. Nonetheless, he might be in superb shape to study the flight of Apollo 11 to the moon. For he was detached this season from the imperial demands of his ego; he could think about astronauts, space, space programs, and the moon, quite free of the fact that none of these heroes, presences, and forces were by any necessity friendly to him. No, he felt like a spirit of some just-consumed essence of the past, and so finally took the liberty to christen himself Aquarius. It was the perfect name for a man who would begin the study of rockets. The water-bearer traversed the earth and breathed the air: three elements were his medium, solid, liquid, and gas. That was kin to the rocket. Apollo 11 would leave the earth, travel on the combustion of its liquids, and traverse space. What indeed was space but the final decompression of a gas? On such unscientific thoughts did Norman, sign of Aquarius, travel.
III
In the middle of his Mayoralty campaign, a story had appeared whose small headlines stated that he would receive a million dollars for doing a book about the astronauts. It was a peculiar story, because the sums listed in the journalistic details added up to $450,000, and this second figure, while certainly too generous, was not vastly inaccurate. Actually, Aquarius would be lucky if he were left with any real money at all, for he was in debt from having made three movies (for which he had put up the cash himself) and he calculated that with the restitution of consequent borrowings, and the payment of taxes, he would have enough to live and think for a year. Not so bad. He had only to write a book about the moon shot. Small matter. It would be as easy to go to the Amazon to study moon rocks as to write a book about these space matters, foreign to him, which everyone would agree is worth a million dollars. In fact everyone thought he was worth a million dollars already. Contributions for his campaign to the Mayoralty stopped on the instant the story appeared. He did not know whether to bless the gods, the Times, or somebody in the office of his agent.
Of course, he was not displeased that everyone thought a quick book by him--magazine, hard-cover, paperback, foreign rights, and syndication--was worth a million. While Aquarius had never been accorded the respect he thought he deserved as a novelist, he had been granted in compensation the highest praise as a journalist. People he had never met were forever declaring in print that he was the best journalist in America. He thought it was the superb irony of his professional life, for he knew he was not even a good journalist and possibly could not hold a top job if he had to turn in a story every day. He had known such journalists, and their work was demanding. They had first of all to have enormous curiosity, and therefore be unable to rest until they found out the secret behind even the smallest event. Since Aquarius had long built his philosophical world on the firm conviction that nothing was finally knowable (an exact and proper recompense to having spent his formative years and young manhood in searching for the true nature of women) he had almost no interest in the small secret behind a small event. (There was invariably another secret behind that.) He preferred to divine an event through his senses--since he was as nearsighted as he was vain, he tended to sniff out the center of a situation from a distance. So his mind often stayed out of contact with the workings of his brain for days at a time. When it was time, lo and behold, he seemed to have comprehended the event. That was one advantage of using the nose--technology had not yet succeeded in elaborating a science of smell.
But calculate for yourself the small ails and woes which came upon Aquarius when he went to visit the NASA Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston two weeks after the conclusion of his Mayoralty campaign. The first and most unhappy truth was that there were no smells coming out of NASA. It was hardly the terrain for Aquarius.
He had grown up in New York. He understood cities, particularly big cities, he had looked forward to getting to know a little of Houston--now, draw near to his vast pleasure in discovering that the Manned Spacecraft Center was not in Houston at all, but located about twenty-five miles south in the middle of that flat anonymous and near to tree-impoverished plain which runs in one undistinguished and not very green stretch from Houston to Galveston. Farther east as he would soon discover was Seabrook, Kemah, and Texas City south of that, then Galveston on the Gulf. Raunchy, sexy, hot and brooding, houses on stilts and old shacks--that was the Gulf of Mexico. He liked it. If he lived there, he too would write like Tennessee Williams. Tennessee, he discovered by this visit, was a natural and simple recorder of the elements.
All that, however, was miles away. MSC (the Manned Spacecraft Center) was located on a tract of many acres, flat and dry as a parking lot, and at the moment of entering the gate past the guard, there was no way to determine whether one was approaching an industrial complex in which computers and electronic equipment were fashioned, or traveling into a marvelously up-to-date minimum-security prison, not a clue to whether one was visiting the largest insurance and financing corporation which had ever decided to relocate itself in the flatlands behind a fence, or if this geometrically ordered arrangement of white modern buildings, severe, ascetic, without ornament, nearly all of two or three stories but for an Administration Building of eight stories, was indeed the newest and finest kind of hospital for radiological research. But, perhaps it was a college campus, one of those miserable brand-new college campuses with buildings white as toothpaste, windows set in aluminum casements, paths drawn by right angle or in carefully calculated zigzag to break the right angle, and a general air of studies in business administration, a college campus in short to replace the one which burned in the last revolution of the students.
In fact, it was the Manned Spacecraft Center, MSC, the home of the astronauts, the place where they were given the bulk of their training in Mission Simulators and Docking Simulators, the Center from which Mission Control would direct and collaborate on their flights, the astronauts’ brain on earth, to nail it thus crudely, when they were up in space. And if this assembly of buildings looked as we have said like the worst of future college campuses, all-but-treeless, milk-of-magnesia white, and composed of many windowless buildings and laboratories which seemed to house computers, and did! why the error was in fact natural. For when Lyndon Johnson, then Vice President, succeeded in getting the unmistakable plum of the new Manned Spacecraft Center located in Texas on land he just happened to know about south of Houston owned by some nice fellows named Humble (Humble Oil & Refining) and ready for the Federal Government to purchase reasonable--reasonable a word capable of being reasoned and expanded with upon occasion--why this purchase might even have a clause inserted that the buildings to be constructed must be capable, in the event of the demise of NASA and the Space Program, of being converted without difficulty into an adjunct of Rice University in Houston. Could it be a crypto-campus after all! Let no one say that Lyndon Johnson was not a super local patriot always working for TALC (Texas Association for the Advancement of Local Culture).
Recognize then how much this Manned Spacecraft Center would honor Aquarius’ sense of smell. Outside the Spacecraft Center, he could not say that his situation was improved. The immediate suburb, Nassau Bay, which housed many of the technicians, engineers, and executives in NASA, was situated on the other side of NASA Highway 1 from MSC, and was built around a body of water called Clear Lake. Nassau Bay and adjoining suburbs like it were all new, their roads laid out in winding turns so absent of surprise that you could recognize they came off the French curve of the draftsman. If these homes were architecturally reasonable, built in sedate earth colors for the most part, charcoal browns, subdued clay-orange, stone-colored tans, houses which were modern but restrained adaptations for the most part of Swiss chalets, Tudor and Elizabethan, with hints of hacienda and ranch corral, they were nonetheless without flavor or odor. Aquarius was discovering that we cherish the sense of smell because it gives us our relation to time. We know how old something is by its odor; its youth, its becoming and its decay are subtly compounded to tell us at once--if we dare to contemplate mortality--how much time has been appropriated by such a life.
Most helpful customer reviews
21 of 22 people found the following review helpful.
A Unique, Entertaining, Exasperating Perspective on Apollo
By Roger D. Launius
I did not read "Of a Fire on the Moon" until years after the conclusion of the Apollo Moon landings between 1969 and 1972. Even so, Norman Mailer had inspired me since I first read "The Naked and the Dead" while in high school. At first, "Of a Fire on the Moon" did not attract me, however; it was so existentialist, so counterculture, so Jack Kerouac-esque. It wasn't until the 1990s when I began to explore the cultural history of Project Apollo as an icon of America memory that I returned to "Of a Fire on the Moon" and came to appreciate it's insights.
As one of the foremost contemporary American writers, Mailer was commissioned to write about the first lunar landing in the 1960s. What appeared in 1970 was this rather confusing account that is written as almost stream of consciousness ruminations on spaceflight. It provides useful insights, most importantly as Mailer with his 1960s countercultural mindset meets its antithesis, a NASA steeped in middle class values and reverence for the American flag and culture.
Mailer was forced in "Of a Fire on the Moon," grudgingly to admit that NASA's approach to task accomplishment--which he sees as the embodiment of the Protestant Work Ethic--and its technological and scientific capability got results with Apollo. He rails at NASA's closed and austere society, one where he says outsiders are distrusted and held at arm's length with a bland and faceless courtesy that betrays nothing.
For all of its skepticism, for all of its esotericism, the book captures powerful insights into rocket technology and the people who produced it in Project Apollo, but it is also heavy going to extract them from this dense book.
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
The best Apollo book...
By R. Rutledge
If you read one book about the Apollo moon landings....this is the one. Any other account is superficial in comparison. The author gives concise technical details of the equipment and procedures of the flight. He also explores the motivation and "psychology" of the astronauts without going gaga over their celebrity. Some funny parts are when he describes the frustration of standing in line for an hour for one soda machine (in a forest of spicy food vending machines, unused). He says 3 men at a ballpark concession stand could service the line in a few minutes. From there he has a dialog of how machines are not the answer to everything.
Another related episode is describing how the NASA engineers prefer to eat alone in their cubicles without interfacing with other humans because they are preoccupied with their technical problems...very accurate.
He compares the specialists of Mission Control to a professor having at his disposal a room of exports on English writers, poets, etc. There are other humorous examples in the book.
Toward the end of the book he weighs in with a history of how computers work, this at a time when most people's exposure to a computer was a card that said "don't fold, staple or mutilate" in their utility bill. His technical description of computers is very well done, and this is the only book on the subject that gives an accurate enough description of the computers in use at Houston and on the spacecraft that allows you to directly compare them to what we have today in a home computer. (32k of memory, for instance, on the spacecraft computers).
His technical accounts of the moon voyage are accurate and cover interesting detail I do not see by other writers; maybe if you dig into enough NASA documents you might find them. He puts a human face on the whole achievment and gives his opinion of what it all means. I think he was less impressed about it than I was, but this book is the best.
19 of 22 people found the following review helpful.
Still the Best Book on the Moon Landing
By roGER
Over 30 years after that glorious summer, its a shock to realise that a tired and jaded novelist described the mission and the technical accomplishment best. Short of money and only just coming to terms with an awful flirtation with politics, this is Mailer's most under-rated and forgotten book.
Its roughly divided into three parts; a deeply personal (egotistic?) description of the weeks leading up to the launch itself; a much larger description of the science and engineering of the Apollo Saturn spacecraft; and a weaker final section attempts to put the event into some kind of social and historical context. This last section is the most dated - remember you're reading an absolutely contemporary account here - the Apollo missions were still on-going when the book was published in 1970-71.
America became bored with space travel, and Mailer (with astonishing foresight) detects and describes the causes - the remorseless banality of the astronauts, and the fearsomely conformist culture of NASA itself.
Overall this is a great book, it has stood the test of time very well, and its a great starting point for anyone interested in the moon landing. Its high time for a reprint and new introduction by the author - and lets thank him for a well written and very honest account of what may be (for historians) the most important event of 20th century, bar none.
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