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Fortunately, it would not have to. Aquarius was no saint. There were his marital breakups and boozy brawls. There had been times when he was up on Benzedrine and down on Seconal and the conviction that he had burned out his talent. Aquarius not only had learned to live with dread, he had learned to use it. If he had not ever quite justified his claims to be a novelist of the first rank, he found journalism could do many of the things the novel used to do when the intellectual communities had been more easily located and defined. In The White Negro, his non-fiction plunge into the world of the hipster, he channeled his thoughts on existentialism, black sexuality, the psychic doldrums of the 1950s, and the depression of the Cold War with its pervasive threat of instant atomic death. It was a controversial essay, but it helped put Aquarius back in circulation.
A decade later, The Armies of the Night, Aquarius' Pulitzer prizewinning coverage of the antiwar march on the Pentagon, still finds him at the height of his unique powers. It ratified the intuitive style and willingness to take public risks that Aquarius demonstrated in Advertisement for Myself—a combination scrapbook, anthology, autobiography and job application. That was a kind of journalism, too. But the job Aquarius wanted was Hemingway's, and he wasn't modest or reticent about asking for it.
Aquarius, in his own words, was "imprisoned with a perception which will settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time."
So it wasn't too surprising to find Aquarius at the beginning of Of a Fire on the Moon recalling his anger at not being asked by the New York Times to comment on Hemingway's suicide. Yet to Scorpio the whole beginning seemed too pat. There was that shopworn Hemingway quote about sleeping with "that old whore death." Not to mention Aquarius' ritual report on the state of his liver, and his recent infatuation with police work: he would prowl Cape Kennedy and the Houston control station like some kind of detective of philosophy. In addition, there was his exploitation of an easy irony: He was an Aquarian, yet not of this Aquarian Age of psychedelic blast-offs and amplified youthquakes.
Before his psychic moon exploration was to end, the philosophical cop image would give way to a sort of Yankee Merlin at King NASA's court. Aquarius, who had certain powers of mimicry, would come to resemble a funky, dejected alchemist who had failed to fit a Saturn rocket, acres of computers and the three astronauts into his Manichaean retorts and crucibles.
Was God or the Devil at the controls of Apollo 11? That was the question that pursued Aquarius. Were Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins, wired and tuned into a vast electronic network, the priests of a new religion? Were they the revised editions of an embattled God who had decided to re-create man as half machine rather than lose him entirely to the devil of technological progress? Where was the heroic mythology that would make a warm place for man among the hardware? Was art now indistinguishable from engineering?