Of a Fire on the Moon Paperback – June 3, 2014

Some thoughts upon rereading Norman Mailer’s, Of a Fire on the Moon.I graduated high school in June of 1969. I barely remember my graduation day, but I will never forget the evening of July 20, 1969, watching TV at a friend’s house on a hot and sticky night in Northern New Jersey when, at 10:18 pm, six hours after touching down on the surface, Neil Armstrong stepped out of the lunar module, Eagle, and set foot on the moon. This was the culmination of a goal set by US president John F. Kennedy in 1961 when he challenged the people of the United States to rally in support of the vision to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade. Kennedy’s challenge came just days after Alan Shepard’s sub-orbital Mercury flight and the United States’ late entry into the Space Race. The Soviet Union had shocked America awake with the launch of Sputnik, the first satellite, in 1957, followed by Yuri Gagarin’s historic April 1961 flight as he became the first man to orbit the earth. The catalyst of the challenge was fear of the Soviet Union and it was as politically driven program as any, but from the beginning, JFK packaged it in a vision so compelling that, at least for me and most of my friends, it defined who we were as Americans during that decade.As a boy I lived through the seasons in the bucolic Finger Lakes of New York. We were isolated from the turmoil and change taking place in the urban areas of the country, but the regular space launches were certainly part of our cycle. Mercury, Gemini and then Apollo: it seemed we were always celebrating a victory or preparing for the next one. Astronauts were celebrities and heroes. Even disaster could not derail the program. The tragic fire on the launch pad of Apollo 1 that took the lives of Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee seemed to motivate the country even more. Less than two years after the accident, the first manned mission, Apollo 8, was a success. Nothing could stop us. We achieved our goal with the Apollo 11 mission with time to spare on that steamy July night in 1969. Neil Armstrong, and just behind him, Buzz Aldrin, set foot on the moon while Michael Collins orbited the moon in the Command Module, waiting to take the team back to Earth. Between that night and the last Apollo mission in 1972, we placed 12 men on the moon and brought them all back safely. It has been more than 40 years since Gene Cernan became the last man to walk on the moon. Our priorities shifted and we have never been out of a low Earth orbit since. This book gave me a chance to relive those magic years and to think a bit about the significance these many years later.Of a Fire on the Moon is a description of the Apollo 11 mission and is Mailer at his journalistic best. It was during this time that Mailer was having success with books that were accounts of current events, often inserting his own character into the narrative. Books such as Armies of the Night, Miami and the Siege of Chicago and others are a kind of historical fiction, with the extremely sharp observations of the writer filtered through his own perspective of the action and even taking part in the action, attempting to steer the outcome. In Of a Fire on the Moon, Mailer is present as character Aquarius, but Aquarius takes a back seat for most of the novel. The book is mostly a remarkable description of this historical event, with analysis of every detail possible from the political environment down to the engineering specifications for the nuts and bolts of the rockets. Mailer’s prose is often lyrical as he evokes the larger images, such as the launch of the giant Saturn rockets or the significance of the back side of the Moon. Parts of this book have always reminded me of Melville: Mailer himself compares the rising Saturn rocket to Melville’s Leviathan (white as the white of Melville’s Moby Dick…slow as Melville’s Leviathan might swim). It is a beautiful and informative account of one of the milestone events of our generation.Aquarius is forced to step into the background for most of the book, since the sheer magnitude of the topic, the adventure into the unknown depths of space, dwarfs any attempt to impose his personality. He does allow Aquarius to pontificate at the beginning of the novel and again at the conclusion. These parts are vintage Mailer and add a sharp perspective to the narrative. His common themes of good versus evil, God versus the Devil, conservative versus Wasp all play out against the canvas of the launch. I found his conclusions chilling, especially considering the 45 years that have elapsed since the publication of the book. Mailer is as excited by the launch as most Americans and he tries very hard to find all the positive aspects. As he understands more about the program a sense of dark foreboding begins to appear. For Mailer, the moon has always been a powerful symbol of the mystical, the pagan and the unknown. Now that we were about to go there, to walk on the surface, doubts about the intent begin to surface. Mailer the hipster, the modern day rebel, is watching a performance choreographed by the conservative elements that he hates. He wants adventure, in the old Hemingway style, but what he finds is nothing but an endless rank of colorless technicians. He wants heroes like Huck Finn or Jake Barnes or even Ahab but the astronauts who are in the best position to be the heroes are a bland group from small town America, Boy Scouts, impersonal, efficient and sanitized to the point of preventing an emotional connection. He admires these men and their actions, but he is repelled by their life and their values, afraid of whom or what will take control of the moon and our future. He even considers that the draw of the Moon may be an evil attraction and one we are not meant to make. He sees a future controlled by banal corporations, military-industrial complex behemoths with technology and efficiency supreme but void of soul, the ultimate evil unleashed on the universe. As he is wrapping up the book, even the political landscape in the United States is changing. Vietnam is ramping up, Nixon is in charge, and the revolution has run off the tracks. Teddy Kennedy has killed a girl in a car accident at Chappaquiddick and walked away in a drunken stupor, staining the name of Camelot and the sanctity of the original vision. A battle between God and the Devil was raging, and it seemed that the Devil was winning.Almost five decades later, we have made huge leaps in technology that have allowed us to understand some of the mysteries of space. The United States built and flew the Space Shuttles on 135 missions over 30 years from 1981-2011, including two accidents that destroyed the orbiters Columbia and Challenger along with 14 lives. This program was instrumental in advancing our knowledge and technology. Without it we could not have built the space station, launched the Hubble telescope or kicked off missions such as Magellan and Galileo. Despite the success, the human scope of the shuttle program never left low Earth orbit. Humans piloted the ships, but they became little more than logistical transportation to the Space Station, a highly evolved semi-trailer. Since this program was terminated, we (the United States) must beg rides on Chinese and Russian rockets to get to the space station. We are sending drones to far corners of our galaxy, and each mission adds huge reservoirs of knowledge. They are all triumphs of technology, but lack the personal involvement, the human participation that we crave in our adventures. I think this is one reason why recent movies like Interstellar are popular: such fantasies always have a live human hero at the stick.Even more than the technology, Mailer feared the technocrats in charge. Today we see a fundamental conservative right that would have scared Mailer to death. We have allowed the growth of the huge military-industrial complex and now watch as we funnel most of our national resources into this “defense” spending, sending equipment, troops and rains of fire over every Middle Eastern Muslim tribe that goads our anger. After this excess, we have precious little resources left to fund even the most antiseptic of space exploration. The right is also caught up in fundamental religious issues. Mailer loved the existential debate about good versus evil but would have skewered the modern religious fervor that has no thought or substance, but relies on blinders and provincial tribalism. Our liberal Democratic Party, the place where Mailer felt most at home, would probably not please him either. They are trying to stay focused on the traditional social values but are also drawn into the vacuum created in the traditional conservative platform as the conservatives move to the extreme ends of their doctrine. Because of this, the Democrats continue to support the wars and defense spending while pushing health, social security and better schooling. Nowhere in their vision is a human adventure that would excite the spirit of Norman Mailer.I am happy to have reread this book. It allowed a dreamy remembrance of the good old days as it also served as a reminder that as a nation we are dangerously out of balance. We are in desperate need of a leadership to give us a common rally point, one in which we may all be proud. I do not see anyone stepping up to the 2016 races who would qualify, but we still have some time.As a footnote, I purchased a limited edition of Moonfire from Taschen Books. This was released on the 40th anniversary of the moon landing. It is a compilation of wonderful photos of the Apollo 11mission from NASA, Life, and other magazines with the haunting prose of Of a Fire on the Moon reprinted in full. Find a way to look at a copy of this amazing book.

... writing, astute observations, nuanced descriptions, but Norman Mailer’s vanity is often unendurable.By often putting himself in the middle as a yardstick it shows how irrelevant he is; that is his (correct) feeling, but PLEASE .... no need to let me know over and over.

The writing is stunning (I had never read Mailer before) and he basically takes the sterile step by step progress to the moon and breaks it down practically moment by moment into very descriptive prose. He includes a great deal of actual transcript of conversations between the astronauts and mission control. His translation of these highly technical issues into solid understandable and, frankly, beautiful prose is amazing. I was 13 when we landed on the moon. That event formed me, I went to Annapolis and became a naval aviator like, and because of, Neil Armstrong with hopes of following in his and others’ footsteps. I have an understanding of the engineering involved, but this book blew me away. If you want to understand this event in detail, it is a must read.

This is one I have meant to read for years, I'm glad I finally did. The author take's us through the metaphor of the Moon landing but also what life was like in 1969. I remember that year and where I was when Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the Moon. This is a great read for those of us of enough to remember it and for these who want to learn about the time

The first half of the book (about Norman Mailer) was pompous and annoying. The second half (about Apollo 11) was interesting and informative.

Mailer, a well known author wrote in totally different way and styele vs. my anticipation. His style is original, recognizes issues and details only great authors are able to. On top writes with such familiarity about the physical background and the technical details as if he were a senior engineeer employed by NASA and participant of the Apollo Project.

If I had wanted to know how Norman Mailer saw the world, how every detail of July 1969 impacted him, or how he tried to weave his own beliefs and convictions or compared himself to the historical figures in the book, I'd have bought a copy of his diary. Very little is to be gleaned from this account of Apollo 11, because it is practically all centered on Mailer, or "Aquarius" as he refers to himself. Don't waste your time or money.

I will have to read this one again. There is so much information to absorb. Mailer succeeds in most parts to place us on the personal journey of the astronauts and he reveals what others overlook.