ABSTRACT
Lovett, who works in unskilled jobs and wants to write a novel, indignantly denounces Soviet purges, the Pact, the perversion of socialism. The ensuing decade, the sixties, witnessed a cosmic shift of intellectual emphasis from the individual's needs to collective urgencies, from psycho-solutions to mass action. Mailer comments in The Armies of the Night that 'the true war party in America was in all the small towns, even as the peace parties had to collect in the cities and suburbs'. The Armies of the Night provides masterly reporting, but novels were the least favoured literary category for this unbookish generation. Movies yes, theatre yes, street theatre, carnival, commedia dell'arte, all immediate, tactile, sensual, communal, here-and-now, but novels were cold between the hands, odourless, designed for elderly and middle-aged book club subscribers, to be read in a state of torpor.
