Offences Against Public Order (Working paper / Law Commission) Book

I read this wonderful book back in the university semester of 1969/70, when I was managing the little library on the main floor of Leonard Hall, my residence for freshman and junior years.

The preceding spring I had been awarded the University Prize for first year English. And Mr. Hanratty, the chief administrator of Leonard Hall, had duly noted that fact.

Now, as it happened, I had visited the collection as a Freshman, and had seen first-hand how ill-maintained it was.

Complaints must have landed on Mr. Hanratty's desk, and now he was killing two birds with one stone. The carrot on the stick which he held out to me was a mid-sized monthly allowance for book buying. A raging bibliophile on a Spartan budget, how could I refuse?

I leapt at the chance. I could help out, and satisfy my book cravings too!

And so, now that I had the job, I obviously had to MAINTAIN the library as well as stock it. On one of my cleaning forays, I started browsing through The Armies Of The Night. It was tremendous.

Mailer, so brash and brazen in his likes and dislikes - strong drink being a big like, and pretentiousness the biggest dislike - was at heart an insecure and slightly paranoid man.

He was antsy in the extreme with his literary peers. Why? Just say that word LITERARY and Mailer would recoil in dread. For him a literary person was a pretentious person.

Take Robert Lowell. Like Mailer, he championed confessional literature in the 1960's - you woulda thought they'd have hit it off. Not a chance. Growing up in the wrong side of the tracks, Mailer trusted no one.

Sad in a way. He just couldn't see the human side of those much better off.

Armies of the Night is a desperate plea for sanity amidst the lunatic melee of the 1968 Republican convention, which would confirm Richard Nixon's desperately polished image of the new Golden Boy of the Right.

Help.

Yes, America would soon need all the sanity it could muster...

But back to Mailer. Reading this book the year after that 1968 melee, I was riveted by his incredibly vivid prose style.

He wrote confessional journalism of the highest calibre. If you want a book of reportage that is brimming with life, read this.

It impressed me so much I adopted his confessional and racy style as my own.

And you still see it 53 years later in reviews like this!