Of a Fire on the Moon narrates his attempt to use the first voyage to the moon to answer his own questions about the true relations of technology to the possibilities of heroism, the existence of powerful experience in a mechanical, dehumanizing age, and the simple adequacy of language and experience to each other in the seventh decade of the twentieth century. Therefore to authenticate his own project he must first encounter -- and prove to us that he has encountered -- powerful, soul-stirring events, and to do so he writes in the guise of the master of experience.

His presentation of the moment of liftoff, which takes the form of a narrative meditation upon it, well exemplifies Mailer's masterful use of his own feelings and imagination as a guide to the reader. He begins with the moment of expectant seeing and immediately places that moment within the prophetic context: "He had his binoculars to his eyes. A tiny part of him was like a penitent who had prayed in the wilderness for sixteen days and was now expecting a sign. Would the sign reveal much or little?" (98). Would the sign in fact come at all, and if it came would it reveal the entire enterprise of the expedition to the moon as a crucial event, a worthy happening, or would it turn out to be just another banal nonevent of the narcotized twentieth century? At this point he includes a transcript of the words spoken by Apollo-Saturn Launch Control during the last few minutes before the launch, including the final seconds of countdown, and then begins the narration of his own experience of viewing it.

But nobody watching the launch from the Press Site ever listened to the last few words. For at 8.9 seconds before lift-off, the motors of the Apollo-Saturn leaped into ignition, and two horns of orange fire burst like genies from the base of the rocket. Aquarius never had to worry again about whether the experience would be appropriate to his measure. Because of the distance, no one at the Press Site was to hear the sound of the motors until fifteen seconds after they had started. Although the rocket was restrained on its pad for nine seconds in order for the motors to multiply up to full thrust, the result was still that the rocket began to rise a full six seconds before its motors could be heard. Therefore the lift-off itself seemed to partake more of a miracle than a mechanical phenomenon, as if all of huge Saturn itself had begun silently to levitate, and was then pursued by flames. (99)

Mailer in the guise of Aquarius here presents what he saw during the first seconds of liftoff, and he makes clear that it has answered his first, basic question -- a question that he has made ours as well -- and that this phenomenon, this Sign of the Times, is an event of true power. He then employs intellectual, rational explanation to show why the viewers at first experience liftoff only in terms of the sense of sight, after which he relates his first impressions, that in its silent levitation the slowly rising rocket "seemed to partake more of a miracle than a mechanical phenomenon" and that it appeared "pursued by flames," instead of jetting them forth. Immediately after having thus introduced these fanciful descriptions and impressions, he then turns his back upon them: "No, it was more dramatic than that. For the flames were enormous. No one could be prepared for that. Flames flew in cataract against the cusp of the flame shield, and then sluiced along the paved ground down two opposite channels in the concrete, two underground rivers of flame which poured into the air on either side a hundred feet away, then flew a hundred feet further" (99-100). Mailer here employs the ancient literary device of denied comparison. After presenting his first descriptions and analogies, he denies their validity and replaces them by others. Centuries earlier Shakespeare began one of his sonnets, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" after which he answered his own query with a similar denial that obviously implied that conventional language and expression were inadequate to his subject. By showing the reader of his sonnet all the ways that the young man to whom he addressed his poem surpasses a summer's day, he could enjoy all the power provided by conventional descriptions and stock analogies, including instant comprehension, without having to accept responsibility for them. At the same time the poet effortlessly demonstrated that conventionalities failed to capture the beauty of his subject, which lay far beyond them and demanded a new, more accurate language. Mailer achieves precisely the same effect when he suddenly changes direction in the midst of his experiential fable.

His use of denied comparison also achieves another effect vital to creating credibility, for such a pattern of suggestion and denial produces the effect (rather, the illusion) of the authorial mind groping toward the comprehension and expression of a difficult truth. Mailer wants readers to receive the impression of a Mailer so committed to communicating exactly what he has experienced, so committed to truth, that he willingly permits them inside his consciousness and allows them to observe him making mistakes and energetically correcting them. He wants them to receive the impression, in other words, of a powerful, honest, mind in action. Like Ruskin and Lawrence, Mailer employs this pattern in dramatizing the experience of perception as a crucial stage in his argument. Since the experience of interpretation plays as crucial a role in our lives as the sheer isolated physical experience itself, Mailer appropriately continues his dramatization by relating how he first gropingly tried to embrace the meaning of the event he was observing. He thereupon continues one of the dominant patterns of his narrative, which is first to communicate an experience and then to offer an interpretation of it, by making elaborate comparisons between the huge white rocket and Moby Dick, another American incarnation of awesome power pervaded by moral and spiritual ambiguity.

At this point in the narration Mailer replaces the experience of sight by that of sound, replaces the data provided by the more intellectualizable, distancing sense of sight by the more basic, more physically stirring senses of sound and motion.

Then it came, like a crackling of wood twigs over the ridge, came with the sharp and furious bark of a million drops of oil crackling suddenly into combustion, a cacophony of barks louder and louder as Apollo-Saturn fifteen seconds ahead of its own sound cleared the lift tower to a cheer which could have been a cry of anguish from that near-audience watching; then came the earsplitting bark of a thousand machine guns firing at once, and Aquarius shook through his feet at the fury of this combat assault, and heard the thunderous murmur of Niagaras of flame roaring conceivably louder than the loudest thunders he had ever heard and the earth began to shake and would not stop, it quivered through his feet standing on the wood of the bleachers, an apocalyptic fury of sound equal to some conception of the sound of your death in the roar of a drowning hour, a nightmare of sound, and he heard himself saying, "Oh, my God! oh, my God! oh, my God! oh, my God! oh, my God! oh, my God!" but not his voice ... and the sound of the rocket beat with the true blood of fear in his ears. (100)

This dramatization of Mailer's experience of the liftoff, which so effectively combines a narrative of sense perception with his first tentative gropings at understanding that experience, perfectly suits his strategy in (~f a Fire on the Moon. Mailer, we recall, goes through most of the crucial events of the moon voyage and landing twice, first imaginatively outside and then inside the events; that is, he first presents the awesome power and size of the machines, after which he interprets the importance and meaning of the events in which these machines played so prominent a role.

But even before he arrives at that final interpretation, he returns to the moment of liftoff and explains the extraordinary complexity of that event itself. In essence, his narrative presentation of what occurs during the first seconds of launch provides the reader with an intellectual experience, as opposed to the earlier purely physical one, of the liftoff:

It was the life experience of such rocket engineers as Von Braun, rather than the laws of physics, which decreed that Apollo-Saturn be chained to its base until the thrust upward was a million two hundred thousand pounds greater than its weight. For that reason, it was manacled by four giant metal hold-down arms. You can be certain there had been cracks in the early forgings of test metals of the hold-down arms for they were not easy to design, being massive in size yet required to let go their million-pound grip on the split part of an instant. The unlatching interval for the four arms had to be all but simultaneous -- the separation was geared not to exceed one-twentieth of a second for its duration: in fact if any of the four arms had failed to complete their operation in more than a fifth of a second, the liberation would have been effected by properly placed explosives.... even with all four holddown arms sprung at once, the rocket ship was still restrained for the first few inches of travel. Something exactly so simple as eight tapered pins had each to be drawn through its own die -- as the vehicle rose through the first six inches of flight, each die was obliged to straighten the taper in its own iron pin -- the eight dies to travel up with the ship, the eight shucked pins to be left in their fastenings on the hold-down brackets. If not for such a simple mechanism, Apollo-Saturn might have leaped off its pad fast enough to set up a resonance, then a vibration strong enough to shake the ship and some thousands of its instruments too critically. For consider: if when empty, the space vessel weighed less than half a million pounds, it was now carrying a weight of fuel twelve times greater than itself. But there were no bones or muscles in this fuel, nothing in the fuel to hold the ship together, just liquids to slosh and shake and seek to distort the rigidity of the structure.... One would look to reduce every quiver in so delicate a structure -- the restraining pins performed just such a function for the first half-foot of ascent.

In the course of this act, at an instant when the spaceship was not yet three-quarters of an inch off the ground, specific switches on the hold-down arms tripped loose a pneumatic system which gave power to surges of compressed gas which ran in pipes up the great height of the launching tower: the gas tripped the couplings of the five service bridges still connected to the rocket. Their umbilicals now detached, these arms pulled away as the ship began to rise. Six inches up, and loose from the pins, the stages of Apollo-Saturn climbed up the stories of the Mobile Launcher, climbed up on its self-created base of flame, up past the flying withdrawal of its bridges and umbilicals. To clear the tower, to be free of any sudden gust of wind which might lash it sideways, a yaw maneuver, programmed into the rocket, was initiated one second after lift-off, and turned the nose a few degrees from the vertical farther way from the tower. For the onlookers three and one-half miles away, the rocket appeared to waver, then stagger. In fact, it did. There was wind blowing, and the rocket had been designed not to fight wind (it was not stressed for that) but to give way to wind, to relinquish the trajectory it was on, and compute a new trajectory from the slightly different position where the gust had left it. So separate commands kept issuing from the Instrument Unit at the top of Saturn, sometimes every half-second, and the motors kept responding with little spurts and sags of speed.... The rocket cleared the tower] after eight seconds. At close to twelve seconds, the four outboard engines were swiveled through a few degrees, a pitch maneuver was initiated, and a roll. The roll would end in twenty seconds, the shift in pitch would continue for two minutes and twenty-five seconds by which time the rocket would be climbing no longer straight up. (211-13)

Mailer's superb technical writing here functions to enhance his credibility in several ways. First, it obviously demonstrates that he understands the often astonishing complexities of the technology involved in the moon program -- and hence, whatever conclusions he draws upon its final meaning and value, the reader will not be likely to attribute his conclusions to that hostility that arises in ignorance and inability to comprehend. Second, the sheer virtuosity of the writing, particularly its combination of clear narrative with an ongoing explanatory commentary, produces another form of his dramatization of experience. Here Mailer does not use his descriptive powers to communicate an experience of awesome sublimity and power. Rather he presents the experience of understanding, placing the reader within an ideal intellectual vantage point where the time that obtains is that of science and technology and not that of the pulses.