Frank Sinatra Leaving Herwith Her Heart So Baldly Brokenalone Again Naturally
If Norman Mailer'south own grapheme Harlot were reviewing this book—and what meliorate occupation for a retired superspy with the about devious listen in the West?—he would probably deduce past style of background that the author has spent a suspicious amount of time preparing us to look the worst of this volume, no doubt to ensure that when it got here we would concur our breath at every curve and dip in the plot—oh my God, he'due south not going to make information technology. "Mailer and the CIA"—past now the very phrase is plenty to strike terror in the centre of a stunt man or soldier of fortune, let alone a cautious, bet-hedging reviewer.
Since two tin play at this game—and since you can't but spring into reviewing a book of 1,310 pages—permit me cord out the suspense a little by reminding late arrivals of exactly why Mailer'southward campaign of disinformation worked then well. To brainstorm with, the bailiwick. The CIA is like a china shop bearded equally a rumpus room and the Mailer of legend is at least half bull. Since practically nothing most whatsoever spy agency, even a leaky 1 like the CIA, can always be proved one manner or the other, it looks as if the novelist can do whatsoever he likes with information technology; and the CIA's own conceits have already prepare formidable standards for fantasy. You lot wouldn't suppose that you could go too far in making up stories about the dreamers who once actually plotted to make Fidel Castro'southward beard fall out—causing him to lose face, so to speak, by gaining it. The heaven inside these people'southward heads would announced to be the limit.
But, of course, there are limits even in there, and laws of probability, and the fact that they are not plainly visible makes the writer'due south task harder, not easier. If you play tennis without a internet, you had better be clumsily proficient at imagining nets, all the way downward to the cyberspace-string shots, and at devising rules that brand sense in a situationless state of affairs. And who would want to impose rules on an imagination that has given u.s. over the years theories about cancer and sexual practice, unfairly but fatally reminiscent of General Jack D. Ripper himself—or to dwelling in closer to our topic, a mind that proposed merely 18 brusque years ago founding "a people'southward CIA," to guarantee everyone a piece of the paranoia.
Of form, nosotros knew that Mailer knew better. For all his apparently riotous living, much of which seemed to accept identify on television, none of his synapses seemed to be missing yet and he certainly hadn't passed that point of no render for writers, the loss of energy. Even the weakest of his simply-kidding books, Tough Guys Don't Dance, fairly hummed with the stuff, but quite pointlessly, like a powerful machine that has spun out of control and is careering off the walls of the lab. After a while you stop expecting anything groovy from it and only wait for it to run down.
Past the time of Watergate at the latest, Mailer seemed so far sunk in playfulness and the need to be original that he couldn't give a straight answer to anything. And every bit if to round off this spree, he finally disgorged a novel that was and so hellbent on being neat that information technology skipped goodness altogether. Unless Ancient Evenings really is an inspired guess almost primitive consciousness (and we'll never know), information technology has to stand on its linguistic-cum-psychological ingenuity. And even Hemingway at his nearly afflated never talked of going i on one with Finnegans Wake.
Nevertheless in retrospect, Ancient Evenings may have been a good book to exit of one's organisation, like a giant kidney rock. It was, to the point of parody, the kind of quasi-masterpiece that is in no bustle to be appreciated: if the critics don't like information technology now, mayhap they volition xx years from now. Or a hundred. It will still be there, a stake in the futurity. So that'due south taken care of.
If Harlot is nevertheless with united states—and if he ever guessed correct about annihilation, which history gives reason to doubt—he would have noticed at least one good omen in those same years, namely The Executioner's Vocal, a documentary style of book, in which the author seems to be testing how much he tin can efface himself from a text, how much he can not show off. The operation was so thoroughgoing that the reader institute himself thinking at times, "This is bully stuff—but why does information technology need Mailer?" Merely of course it was great precisely considering of Mailer, whose best writing has always been cocky-effacing, mayhap to his annoyance.
The chronology suggests that Executioner was partly designed to buy indulgence for Aboriginal Evenings, but if and then, the price was fashion too high. What it did do was give its author a workout in American realism, far off his usual celebrity writer rounds, and us a reminder that the machine was equally powerful as ever, and that Mailer could notwithstanding command it whenever he chose to.
Subsequently only a few pages of Harlot's Ghost, it becomes clear that he chooses to very much this time. And later a stretch of cranking and sputtering it also becomes reassuringly clear that the whole crazy contraption is working too as if not better than ever.
The boring and somewhat "literary" opening, full of arcane New England botany and topology—the narrator's "roots" in the most literal sense—is actually something of a decoy, and it seems simply fair to warn the reader that information technology builds toward a climax that will just take to hang out there until the next book. Although Mailer strikes some notes in this department that will reverberate through the whole enterprise, at that place are in sum an awful lot of words for a rather small effect—a strategy more Conradian than Hemingwayesque—and I couldn't help wondering, as the narrator wound into his "Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley once more" account of returning to an excessively haunted house for the climax that never quite comes, whether Mailer wasn't intentionally slowing the reader downwardly here and elsewhere (wearisome patches are dotted throughout, like speed bumps) to assure usa that this will not be a page-turner, it volition not be slick.
Anyway, slick the volume certainly is non. Simply a page-turner it is for a slap-up deal of the time, and none the worse for it. The all-time sequences in the volume, all of which involve the CIA in activeness, require a sure breathlessness, as the operatives spin through their madcap motions faster than the speed of thought; as with the Blood-red Queen in Alice this is the step they have to maintain in spyland merely to stay in the same identify.
And the same place is very much where Mailer'south version of the CIA wants to stay—that is to say, right in the middle of a cold war that is built to concluding until Armageddon at the earliest (afterward which we'll probably need an even larger budget), a cold war that bustles with activity and goes absolutely nowhere so that you can confidently enter your son'southward name for it at birth at the same time you're entering it for Yale. And never mind for a moment the relative probability of this version—suffice it to say that this is the kind of cold state of war we actually got, whether we got information technology Mailer's way or not, and that the testimony in the recent Robert Gates hearings has been the best testimonial Mailer's conjectures could possibly take hoped for. Unless several very impressive witnesses were lying, the existent-life CIA put upwards a last-ditch struggle to save its cold war every bit grim equally anything in the annals of welfare.
The heart of the novel concerns a properly Skull and Bonesy generational laying on of CIA hands. The hero, or Alice figure, one Hedrick (Hal or Harry) Hubbard, is a son of the pioneers, two of them in fact, his earthly male parent Cal being a straightforward, hard-drinking old Samurai who demands only the occasional brandish of superhuman courage to win his love, or at least his attention,1 and his spiritual one being Harlot himself, aka Hugh Tremont Montague, the company mystic and cold war metaphysician who wants a flake more—namely a jump of religion and a sense of transcendence, both symbolized by rock-climbing, which he and Hal solemnly undertake together every bit an ethereal rite of passage.
Like any good apostle Harlot burns to pass on his vision to a younger version of himself, but as, I propose, is his wont, he guesses desperately, incorrect about both his disciple and his vision, since all he winds upwards actually passing on to young Hal is his own wife, who lands in the youngster'due south bed afterwards a thousand pages or so of footsy; and if he is all the same alive, he has been obliged to watch the whimpering end of the real cold war from a wheelchair, to which his rock-climbing has dispatched him, a victim for life of his own metaphor. Thus perish all spy organizations, one might wish.
Although Mailer does not push the symbolism of those events anything similar every bit hard equally this business relationship may brand it sound, Hal's cuckolding of his god-father never quite makes sense on any but the symbolic level, whatever more than his beloved for his rather goatish father does. Never mind for now. A narrator doesn't have to know why he does what he does. What is articulate to us at least is that young Hal is a far libation brood of cat than his elders—then much and then that his real male parent asks him despairingly why he is in the bureau at all and he answers, "Because I similar the work."
With this answer the book is, for my coin, saved. If he had said either "I'm in it because I want to be like you," or, self-deludingly, "I actually hate Communism, you know," it would have unleashed everything that is second-best about the novel. What made Mailer famous and worth writing about in the first place was neither his knowledge of the human middle, which is variable, nor his global theories, just his overpowering intuition of men at war—with each other, with culture, but all-time of all with and within the organizations created by and for themselves.
The Naked and the Dead became easy to underestimate the minute afterwards information technology had left the room and the touch had worn off. But for all its faults, it striking 1 like a pile driver the first time effectually, and here the same theme is dorsum, with the bugs removed. And if information technology doesn't striking quite as hard now, this is partly because the globe had grown older and we're used to Mailer and all the niggling mailers past now, just partly considering it keeps on running long after the reader has lost his offset wind, and because the touch seems at times to be packed in the thick cotton of a romance that starts out as an interesting possibility and ends up as a plot device. But if you follow Hal Hubbard's instructions, and go along your center on the piece of work, you lot will discover there the kind of intensely imagined earth that just the very best novelists can create or sustain—leaving one to wonder where the writer has been all these years. Like James Jones, his literary brother in arms, he comes to life at regimental reunions in whatever guise, and his strength comes surging back.
Hal's "I similar the work" would have had to seem a dangerously watered-down and facetious way of looking at things to either of his fathers. The founders of the CIA needed a great big vision to get this thing off the footing, and to justify a spy bureau in peace-fourth dimension, just in the giddy first years of the common cold state of war the air was thick with visions, and while Harlot by elimination is based by and large on James Angleton (if he isn't Angleton, who is?) there are times when he could hands pass for Whittaker Chambers in full rhetorical sail.
Merely second-generation bureaucrats need no such infusions of hot air to keep their department aloft and the appropriations coming. They know by heart, because it is all around them in their infancy, the neat principle of stasis and stability in our democracy, which of course is that information technology needs a mighty effort to get something like the CIA, or the farm program, or annihilation at all started but a Herculean one to get it stopped. And so they know they are safe to enjoy their work, which, nether all its accretions of circumlocution and peak-secret newspaper, has long since become its own justification.
And what work information technology is. For four hundred or so inspired pages Mailer portrays the CIA strutting its stuff in ii very unlike regions ("theaters" would exist the appropriate word), and anyone who tin notice a meaning difference between their work and what is commonly known as play deserves to be debriefed and turned into a mole before the other team finds out.
In Berlin, the game consists mostly of the abiding turning and unturning of agents, and then that no one on either side tin begin to tell yous which of "their people" are actually "our people," or to what degree. The best possible insurance policy for an ambitious German of any historic period or sex activity who wants to get in on the fun is to sell his services to both sides simultaneously. But what makes it unmistakably a game is that none of this Len Deighton street theater makes any serious difference—none that can be institute now, anyhow, as 1 traces the existent ups and downs of the cold war.
As ringmaster Nib Harvey—the bodily name of the Berlin station chief—explains over his fifth martini or so, nosotros already know all nosotros need to know about the Russians (he is talking in the 1950s), to wit that they are years and years away from being able to invade Western Europe—a piece of information that must have been very hard to miss (but concealing all of the jerry-built railroad train lines would have been beyond anything we know of Russian capacities). Meanwhile the CIA's chore is just to continue the pot bubbles, and the public entertained, so that there volition still be a CIA when World Communism makes its big move for the souls of men.
If Harvey is correct, information technology seems fair to extrapolate that many if not all of these fabled CIA operations were simply common cold state of war make-work, a WPA for Yalies and would-be Yalies, who would naturally need a Holy War to justify living off the government teat, to use their own phrase. And if this seems unduly contemptuous, once again one can only say that the operations certainly look like brand-piece of work for all the difference virtually of them made to the form of history. And anyway the estimate doesn't come from Mailer, who is cautious to a (well-nigh welcome) fault with his own conjectures; it comes, like a burp, from the liverish Harvey who is a bit of an outsider himself, a former FBI defector in our own niggling cold state of war between agencies and the only operative uncouth plenty to see through the exquisite Kim Philby. And Harvey's putative drunkenness is itself a species of disinformation. Is he planting rumors today or genuinely blurting?
Whatever the existent William Harvey may have been like, Mailer's recreation is a true likeness of someone, and whoever it is is made to order for that spy novelist'southward gold mine, postwar Berlin. A James Bond who is congenital like a pear and has to throw upwards periodically, Harvey comes across equally at once grandiose and seedy, a dandy who can fart at volition and an all-round ailing interloper at the CIA co-operative of the Yale drama school. If the game is to acquire information that you lot don't need every bit sensationally as possible, he will by God get all the fashion and build a tunnel correct nether the enemy's ass to get it—just the kind of caper to brand one a fable in the bureau, which is all, one suspects, that about of these people really want.
And to match Harvey excess by wretched backlog, Mailer has fashioned Dix Butler, an accurate wild homo of the Fifties, yawping and clawing for experience like Jack Kerouac or, less primitively, like Henderson the Rain King, equally the schoolmarms close in on him. The game for the likes of Dix Butler is to stay in booze coin without either having to wear a suit or quite interruption the law, and once again the CIA is the ideal reply, similar a government grant, and Berlin the perfect playground. Since nigh every Berliner is a potential agent waiting for someone to turn and unturn him, Butler is complimentary to roar through confined and bordellos to his center'due south delight, bullying and seducing as the mood takes him while the agents fall out of the copse either style, and writing it all off to limitless expenses. At European prices, fifty-fifty graduate students used to feel like conquerors in those days. Only here is the real swaggering thing, and Butler'due south triumphal rambles plant a quite vivid pick by Mailer equally foreground to the whole crazy "we may all be dead tomorrow, so what'll we practise this night" atmosphere of a peachy metropolis perched on the border of the common cold war, halfway between terror and boredom. ("Don't tell me we may all be dead tomorrow again?")
Fifty-fifty in the CIA, all practiced things and postings come to an finish—merely if yous play your cards correct, they are replaced by more good things, and our narrator Hal Hubbard next finds himself in Uruguay, where a different kind of play is going on, every bit dissimilar every bit Wagner from Puccini, but non without its giggles.
Operatic is probably the only word to describe the Latin political mode every bit rendered by Mailer, or even by Castro, and once again, Mailer and the CIA have called a most suitable American to insert into the plot. Howard Hunt is the author's 2nd "existent" graphic symbol of any consequence, and once more Mailer has probably tailored him to his own specifications, leaving only the name and a persona that doesn't jar likewise grossly with the facts. At whatsoever rate, Mailer's version is a very model of Yankee bella figura, the kind of dude who likes nothing better than to conduct his dirty business while hosing downwardly his polo pony or exchanging gorgeously insincere after-dinner speeches with his hosts nearly the undying dear between our great countries. Hunt'due south normal agenda is as decorated and vacuous as a day in the life of a Jane Austen heroine, and the high point of his agency'due south activities during Hubbard'south stay is the taping of an infidelity in the Russian diplomatic mission, the publication of which will, it is hoped, cause one of the Russians to defect in a rage, though with what object nobody bothers to ask any more than. It will simply give us someone else to debrief, re-brief and worry about and a temporary psychological edge—in Uruguay! Nevertheless information technology must be washed. An agency tin't but sit there.
The tape of the adultery, transcribed in the pidgin Russian of a bad translation, is funnier than Mailer has ever shown signs of being, equally if the full general mellowing and cooling off of vanity much noted in cover stories have finally brought him to the indicate where nearly writers begin. Sense of humour if it's ever going to become there usually declares itself early, so a late-blooming humorist would be something to celebrate—peculiarly this ane, our intrepid conqueror of new worlds who only occasionally makes it.
A skeptic might pause hither to point out that it's hard non to exist funny well-nigh the CIA, and outside of the fact that, equally every comic knows, it is never difficult not to be funny about anything, he would take a point. However at the same fourth dimension i's blood runs slightly chilled at the thought of grown men cackling similar schoolboys over some of the pranks that pass for high policy in the CIA. The upper classes at play accept e'er been a daunting sight to normal people, and when the sainted Harlot himself descends from the clouds in the last act and lights upward with glee over a scheme to "turn", a Jewish homosexual agent into a Christian hetero one in society to seduce information out of a homely secretary, one may feel that squealer-sticking tin can't be far backside.
And this is Mailer'due south real subject area, whatever he thinks information technology is himself: Dink Stover goes to Berlin, to Republic of cuba, to Vietnam—but taking with him everywhere the sense of an sometime boys political party at two in the morning where, amongst the roar of laughter and crash of glass, somebody accidentally gets killed. One of the means in which Mailer has been disinforming united states of america most fiendishly most his own seriousness is the frequency with which he seems to accept been dining out himself lately. Only conspicuously this has been field work of the most exacting kind, a grueling excavation into the mind of the dining classes; and if he hasn't always got the sound of these people quite correct, this can perhaps be traced to one concluding damning piece of testify Mailer has given u.s.a. over the years, namely those peculiar little movies he made back in the Sixties, which suggested that, to put it tactfully, his ear for dialogue is not absolutely pitch perfect.
But dialogue has never been what Mailer is almost; he wants cipher less than the souls, the essences of his subjects, in relation to which their dialogue is but the froth at the summit of the mug. And the souls of the CIA might be looked for along the following lines.
In an officially classless social club like our own, the ruling class has to be a shadowy thing by definition, a hush-hush society unto itself whose members identify each other—but who can exist sure?—past such outward signs of inward grace as emphasis and personal style (clothes are besides easy to acquire, and only weed out the troglodytes) and, above all, past "beingness in the know," by beingness plugged into the central dynamo. If you got your data from a source in Washington, you barely laissez passer, if you got it from "Tuppy" or "Boots" himself, you win this one cleanly. But if y'all practice too much of either of these things, you're trying too hard and y'all return to "go."
The platonic ploy is, of course, to be perceived to be in the know while you lot talk nearly inscrutable nothings, holly-hocks, and hunting dogs—in other words to audio as English as possible. To be rumored to be in the CIA tin be a source of immense social power in some circles, akin mutatis mutandis to being something or other in the Mafia. So of all the clubs this class has then far formed, to declare itself while giving nothing away, this government agency with the untraceable expense account is the purest and nearly platonic. We know who we are, and you just know that we're someone pretty of import. Perfect.
But the game doesn't cease once you're in the club: members must continue working on their style and their insideness until they die or driblet from sight. In a piece of acute and assuringly accurate social observation, we find Kittredge Montague mocking Howard Hunt's alleged snobbishness in a letter of the alphabet to Hal the narrator.
It seems that Hunt's family, of which he seems so proud, is nothing like as good as hers, fancy that. Information technology'southward not, as her facetious tone makes urgently clear, that things of that kind really thing at all, but if Mr. Hunt wants to play by those rules—well, it does give her a heaven-sent take a chance to inform us of how very good her family is, without seeming to boast almost it. I mean information technology actually doesn't matter, does information technology, either to her or the CIA? But Hunt (Mailer'due south version) has given the impression that it matters to him, then simply like that he has lost the game. He has blurted, in fashion if not words, and shown his credentials, instead of bold he doesn't demand to and just breezing on in. And since imposters and arrivistes have certain obvious advantages at intelligence over people who take never had to work at their manners, it is only fair that bluish-bloods should seize such openings.
What is particularly haunting nigh this sequence, exterior of the touching unself-consciousness with which real height people like Kittredge give their own game away again and again for novelists similar Mailer—and Truman Capote—to snap upwardly (it must seem to them like talking in front end of the servants), is that y'all would have to be quite a ways within the club yourself to run into any departure whatever between Kittredge's lofty family and Hunt's inferior one. (I can only say, in the same "isn't it all too silly?" spirit, that they both seem pretty trashy to a Sheed of Aberdeen and Sydney.)
But in the optics that count, Howard Hunt is a minor-league gentleman perfectly suited to a minor-league country like Uruguay, where loud colors are more likely to impress the locals than the grays and nuances of a real bigleague gent—whom only another gent can truly appreciate anyway. And here toward the end of our hero's apprenticeship the book reaches its outset natural stopping identify, with our traveling salesman-like representative, the alleged Hunt, matching mode for mode with the local blowhards, while over the transom and under the door seep the start emanations from Castro's and Batista's Cuba (culturally it is still both at one time), which promises to be a actually weird theater, if the get-go messengers are annihilation to go past: Chevi Fuertes, a café philosopher and double agent who is quite capable of turning and unturning himself from side to side by just listening to himself talk, and the fabled Libertad, a transvestite courtesan who turns men, as it were, to putty in her hands.
two.
If Harvey was perfect for Berlin and Chase for Uruguay, what manner of fauna could the agency have upwardly its sleeve for such a theater as this? No one, as we shall run into to our regret, simply the same ones recycled, as Mr. Gates is existence recycled right now—only here I wish that Mailer had rung down the curtain on Volume 1 with the question still in the air; in fact I'g tempted to practise then for him, by stamping his ain phrase "to exist continued" on this review before both the review and the book have to go wheezing together around the rail one more fourth dimension.
However, it probably wasn't applied for him, in publishing terms, to stop, with all the comic strip events—the Bay of Pigs, the Missile Crisis, Jack Kennedy—still in front of him, and it isn't applied for me. But if y'all don't imagine an intermission nearly here, you may take the impression that the writer is gasping for breath in the second half, whereas he is just shuffling sets and characters and starting over with a slightly different kind of book.
By continuing the same one without pause, Mailer sacrifices several things, the virtually obvious existence much take a chance of a careful reading by the kickoff round of reviewers, who are guaranteed to use some of the space usually designed for analysis to groaning amusingly over the book's length. To a busy reviewer, who is not paid by the hour or the ton of manuscript, the word "long" automatically means "too long," and if such a ane does read all the way to the end it will probable be with a sarcastic impatience that relatively few books can stand up up to (run across Moby-Dick).
Fortunately, readers who pay for their books don't much mind how long they are, and for the material covered Harlot's Ghost is non too long at all. Insofar as the subject area of the novel is the CIA and its doings, one feels that it has barely gotten started by the end, and the coy "to exist continued" is properly frustrating; but as a study of a grouping of people, information technology has meanwhile gotten steadily weaker and weaker, until some of the principals barely limp across the pseudo finish line and one doesn't listen a bit if they make up one's mind to take a adept long balance earlier starting upward on their next rounds.
The almost conspicuous prey in length is the romance between Hal Hubbard and his godmother, Harlot'southward married woman, Kittredge. This was quite a stunt to attempt in the kickoff place. It is hard for about male writers to return a female person graphic symbol at novel length, especially with the audience primed to jeer as it is with Mailer, and to some extent one may feel he has solved the problem past cheating a little and taking what used to be called a man's mind and merely calculation skittishness. Only this is to quibble. Anyone, man or woman, attempting to describe Katharine Hepburn, let solitary Eleanor Roosevelt, would encounter fifty-fifty more atheism. Indeed, any character held upward to this kind of scrutiny begins to look kind of funny, so Mailer's women never accept a hazard.
But by normal community standards, Kittredge is real plenty and even likable plenty (tastes will differ, as in real life). Simply Mailer is not content to leave her lifting the low-cal-weights: she must besides be captivating enough to keep our immature narrator, who is many years her junior and lubricious to boot, in unconsummated thrall for the length of an Irish gaelic courtship almost entirely on the force of her letter-writing ability, which, unlike her bewitching presence, is right out in that location on the page for u.s. to be bugged by, or not, ourselves.
As with any loony endeavor, the wonder is that this affair works at all. The note of individual-joke casualness struck past whatsoever 2 strangers writing to each other is every bit hard to capture as a random number in math; nevertheless, with our complicity, Mailer makes Kittredge's letters sound real and plausibly attractive and sufficiently idiosyncratic right through the Uruguayan flow, which means halfway through the book.
After which, forget information technology, as yous might suppose. By the time Jack Kennedy has come and gone, the ii lovers simply seem to exist shoveling data at each other in any voice comes to hand, and their occasional declarations of love sound perfunctory and no longer make sense to anyone but themselves. What on globe do they recall they're in beloved with at this point? We accept reached the stage where the onlookers take completely given upwards on the couple. He may nevertheless be charmed by her caprices and changes of mood, just we don't have to be. And whatever Kittredge decides to do side by side, be information technology, as the opening suggests, switching gears and taking off with Dix Butler, or merely flying to the moon, is all the same to us.
And the aforementioned goes double for her much advertised Alpha and Omega interpretation of personality. This gender-lite contribution to the world's stock of dualisms—yin and yang, animus and anima, etc.—is near the simply trace in the book of Mailer's spit-balling period when he was spraying the mural with theories, and feminist critics may make what they volition of the fact that he easily it to a woman. Just it surely should be taken equally a sincere compliment, a souvenir from the heart, because the theory is vintage Mailer. Notation, past way of trademark, that there is no personality permitted, no life lived, within the extremes: either your Alpha is on meridian today or your Omega, and Lamda and Upsilon might likewise pack up and go home. Anyone consulting the rich jumble in his ain head may exist relieved to learn that information technology all boils down to two distinct, fully articulated personalities—not ane self to go drunk and the other to go to church, but each to exercise both, with varying degrees of willingness and profit—because from the inside ane could swear there are a dozen or so bits and pieces of personality rattling effectually in there with one disheveled spokesman fronting for the lot of them to the outside globe.
In other words, the theory, equally baldly stated, seems at once both too schematic and too vague, and no better or worse than a hundred other theories that the owners don't even bother to patent. The test of grade is where Kittredge, a paid psychologist for the CIA, goes with it, and the answer I fearfulness is merely most nowhere, except to apply it to assorted events with predictably imprecise results: so-and-so's Omega was really running wild today, it plain hasn't talked to his Alpha in months (but so what tin can you lot expect of a Gemini whose star is in Pisces?).
The only utilize for this jabberwocky worthy of the rest of the book would exist to cite it as an case of the crazy things the CIA was willing to pay money for in those days. And if the writer didn't hateful it that way, this is neither hither nor there. The point is the Blastoff-Omega doesn't matter a straw to the real business of the novel. The only excuse for introducing it in the start place was presumably to provide some intellectual underpinning for a tale of divided souls. But this is not the primary piece of work of the novelist anyway, which has fortunately been done so well and thoroughly in scene after fine scene that no amount of jaw-boning can fatally harm it.2
The labyrinthine psyches of the feral American Dix Butler and the serpentine Chevi Fuertes sprawl all over Kittredge's blueprint obliterating the lines, and when the ii or more of their personalities are finally brought together the shock of battle, of self colliding uncomprehendingly with self, well-nigh explodes off the page. And this is just one of several epic male encounters, to which Mailer now brings the insights of age combined with the alertness mixed with apprehension of youth and of a fourth dimension in life when 1 might, especially if one was Mailer, find oneself suddenly thrust into the very center of such scenes.
And then well does Mailer convey the latent menace of the unhousebroken male that i of his near powerful confrontations tin can really get away with occurring offstage in the all-time Aristotelian manner, without losing an ounce of fire power. The mere thought of Bill Harvey and Harlot beingness solitary in the same room brought back memories to me at to the lowest degree of gazing spellbound at the headmaster'southward door and wondering what's happening in at that place, and what they will both look like immediately afterward. So it's deflating to call up that whatever it was could have been reduced fifty-fifty conceptually to a couple of Greek letters playing on separate seesaws. Simply here as elsewhere, one feels that Mailer the novelist and observer has scooted so far alee of Mailer the thinker that the erstwhile philosopher can barely see his gifted partner's back, although he yet keeps trying to jump on information technology.
Harlot's showdown with Harvey is 1 of the imposing peaks that defines the shape of the putative Book One. But it is a defect of the novel and of the agency besides that both characters should exist dragged into Volume Two, the Cuba volume, where they manifestly don't vest. In the case of Harlot no real harm is done. Although Latin America isn't his circus, Harlot can make mischief and subplots anywhere he goes, and the worst that happens from the novel'due south point of view is that the reader mildly wishes that he, with his handbag of tricks, and his wife Kittredge with her theories, would but go away for a while and let us concentrate on this new stuff. Harlot is presented as a homo of a thousand faces, but he'south ever wearing the same erstwhile one when we encounter him.
But the case of Bill Harvey is serious and constitutes perhaps the book's virtually convincing criticism of the CIA. Information technology is a feature of large organizations in general (for some reason, the Jesuits come up to listen) that they like to keep their best people moving effectually and effectually until all the stars wind up in the incorrect place—where if these best people are Jesuits they will learn humility and if they are agents they will from fourth dimension to fourth dimension imperil the free earth, or at least inflict xx or thirty years' worth of damage on it.
In such organizations, when Parkinson'due south law of upward failure is blocked vertically, it just branches out sideways. Nib Harvey and his sidekick Dix Butler in Cuba, 2 Wagnerians in Puccini-state, neither know nor want to know that in this part of the world fighting words are really an honored culling to fighting, and that the last affair Castro or JFK wants is for anyone to be crass enough to act on Fidel's arias. Just what do politicians know about these things? thinks Harvey, from deep in the bag, his regular habitat, equally it seems to be one-half of the agency's. The CIA has its ain wisdom; and Harvey, fresh from playing God in a existent theater, knows amend than anybody. Proper name a country, and he'll tell yous what'due south adept for it.
So information technology came to laissez passer, in Mailer's volume at to the lowest degree, that Harvey and Butler, or common cold warriors just like them, pretty much took Cuban policy by the scruff and hauled it into their own sphere, rocking the gunkhole so difficult that diplomacy was incommunicable and incidentally giving their president a much more fiendish fight than he always got from Castro—although Mailer, on his best behavior throughout, doesn't offer a specific assassination theory, but just surrounds the event with Cuban-CIA intrigue and leaves it upwards to us.
Fortunately a novelist doesn't have to prove anything at all, just make it convincing, and by echoing and embellishing Philip Agee's diary of those days,3 Mailer at least establishes (charmingly) a convincing setup for his version; the buzz of politics and toy soldier preparation with the Cuban refugees, the huge concentration of agency attention and personnel, and the nonstop unofficial raids on the Cuban declension to keep the pot boiling—all this just for a Bay of Pigs? Since that one-half-hearted fiasco is the most reliable guide we have to JFK'due south own wishes, information technology is tempting to say that Mailer wouldn't accept to bear witness his example even outside a novel. If the bureau didn't want more war with Republic of cuba than Kennedy did, so neither his moves nor theirs make any sense at all.
What Kennedy did want may possibly be deduced from his own rather dreamy choice of deus ex Pentagon to the Cuban mess, namely the quiet simply ugly American himself, Edward Lansdale, surely the ultimate misplaced star of the common cold state of war. Lansdale was by now in the position of somebody who had bet Truman to win in 1948—an expert forever, fifty-fifty if he never bet correct on anything else as long as he lived. Having successfully won the evidently somewhat special hearts and minds of the Filipinos, Lansdale, the Kennedy boys figured, could do information technology anywhere, and before he was through, this peace-loving soul would have wandered into and slightly exacerbated hostilities in both the Caribbean area and Southeast Asia.
If this cross betwixt a Bible salesman and minor college professor (Mailer'due south version is kinder than Graham Greene's) always indeed had a gamble in Cuba—and early returns suggest that he was completely at sea—the hostility of the bureau quickly took intendance of that: for all its glamorous trimmings, the CIA had long since become a rock-ribbed hierarchy that knew but how to deal with hotshots from upstairs, and of all the hearts and minds that Lansdale e'er failed to piece of work his charms on, none proved colder or more impenetrable than those of his countrymen, Bill Harvey and the boys at the club.
Meanwhile, back at the White House our president is making elaborately certain that no future novelist will ever take far to look for love interest, and information technology takes only the slightest of segues for our narrator to find himself spang in the heart of a Kennedy love caper.
Of all the existent names in the book, the author makes the best case for using Kennedy's. He says y'all tin't only invent a sexy, forty-two-yr-old president whatever more than y'all tin invent a Frank Sinatra.4 And Mailer has the good sense not to march these lions on stage but to leave them mostly in the oratio obliqua (extremely obliqua at times) of a flaky, hard-drinking air hostess named Modene Murphy, who is definitely the kind of woman Mailer can describe well, although doing so will probably non advance his crusade with feminist critics. Within the limits of celebrity mimickry, Mailer aquits himself ingeniously, dashing off a charming and somewhat Shavian Kennedy, a warm-blooded version of Shaw's Julius Caesar toying good humoredly with a considerably hipper Cleopatra. (Goose egg is harder than for an older novelist to capture a immature grapheme just correct, and Mailer'south Castro as well sounds a bear on besides world-weary for his age in the few lines he's given: or maybe it's only the cares of state talking. In any event, both characters represent possible readings; neither is a travesty.)
There are no real travesties to exist plant in the book even when the characters seem to beg for it. Mailer had evidently decided he tin get more out of them with the utmost seriousness and seeing them as far as is humanly possible as they see themselves. If he seems at times to have stayed inside them a little also long and gone over to their team halfway, that's the risk you take when you work this close to your subjects. And the reward is the all-time Faustian deal a novelist could hope for, a slew of convincing portraits, even downward to the chip parts, the faces at the embassy, the voices at the bar.
If, to suggest another as impractical redrawing of the book'due south boundaries, Harlot's Ghost were to begin with the narrator's inflow in Berlin, properly introduced, and stop with the Bay of Pigs, it would be a much harder volume to bother at. During near of this span, the writer is safely within what athletes call "the zone" where, at least in terms of what he is attempting, he can do no wrong. If he announces an anecdote, or starts a scene, you have the sense that this is just what the story needs at this bespeak. And fifty-fifty the CIA craft mumbo jumbo, which earlier in the book had reminded me of a slightly breezier version of Melville on whales, seems like function of the fun.
Which means that the reader is in the zone likewise, and helping. And and then what if a character occasionally forgets his or her obligations not to sound besides much similar the author and barks out something in purest Mailerese ("believe this," someone volition say in midsentence, or "be very sure that…"). Just as one doesn't discover the terrible prose in the last twenty pages of an Agatha Christie novel, so besides any mistakes Mailer inevitably makes in this impressively long stretch of beginning-rate work are swept upward in the action all the way to the Bay of Pigs, which Mailer describes in the manner of Stendhal at Waterloo: by the time the participants know what is happening, the battle is long since over. And they have the residue of their lives to notice that what seemed to them like the whole universe, or at to the lowest degree the glorious starting time of a major war, is perceived as a small-scale embarrassment on its style to a footnote by the exterior world.
It tin't happen too often that history offers such a perfect climax to what an author has been saying. The Bay of Pigs has almost everything Mailer'south CIA is fabricated of: hot air and hocus pocus, fecklessness and waste. The one thing it lacks, unfortunately, is the one thing that would let Mailer off the hook for good, namely certitude. The Bay of Pigs didn't change the CIA or fifty-fifty chasten it; it simply made the boys mad, to the roots of their schoolboy souls, and eager to brand themselves seem even more necessary, to the roots of their bureaucratic souls.
No doubt to terminate the volume here would exist false to the facts, and to the nature of the subject. Still, information technology would be good for the novel, which after all, is not a perpetual motion machine, but is designed from the outset to go a certain distance, and not a heck of a lot further. Even a novel about the Hundred Years War has to end onetime, but Harlot'due south Ghost runs right over the sides of the frame equally the author tries to cram more and more than history into a manifestly finite pic. The natural size has really been established quite firmly by the opening sequence: as we enter an accordingly sinister country firm, Harlot has either just died or defected, and Hal, Bix, Kittredge, and 1 other central character have been assembled and frozen there, as in a game.
Whatever else it does, the book obviously has to go dorsum and atomic number 82 the characters footstep by step into the house and unfreeze them and prove why any of this matters: which means, at the very least, that it has to go along u.s.a. interested in them. Yet faced with a selection of delivering on that pledge or giving u.s. a sizzling account of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Mailer doesn't hesitate.
Nor at this indicate should we perhaps desire him to. By the time Khrushchev and Kennedy face up off over the missiles, Harlot is merely improvising like an old vaudevillian anyway, and non growing into the rich foreign character nosotros've been promised, while Hal and Kittredge are barely hanging on to each other like marathon dancers, in case the writer should need them old. And the firm, which has been and then portentously described along with its ghost, disappears altogether. Meanwhile, Hal'due south father Cal has undergone a quirky surge of life as a character, and Mailer has the wit and expert sense to identify any conjectures about Marilyn Monroe's death squarely in Cal'south tipsily romantic skull. But Cal won't fifty-fifty be in the large-bang scene that opens the book, so this is just more garnish. And the writer's own interest in resolving his story may be divined from his announcement that he plans to dash off a book about Picasso before he gets round to it. And if Picasso should lead to Matisse, or perhaps to a novel nearly bullfighting (take that, Papa)—well, 1,310 pages is a lot of expert behavior to brand up for.
And so we may never know what happened. Yet Harlot's Ghost would not exist the kickoff book to comprise a disastrous structural flaw (in the case of Tender is the Night, the flaw is well-nigh a landmark by now). And the many first-class pages of this one should not exist buried nether its mistakes. Mailer writes English language by ear and he swings for the fences, so his gaffes can be spectacular,v merely so can his successes, and I noted more apt and pleasing phrases than in any other Mailer book I can recollect.
Beyond that, he has written a surprisingly well-orchestrated picaresque novel—more Deighton than le Carré, if one must take these slatternly comparisons—about a masonry within a masonry, namely virtually the Ivy Leaguers at the heart of the CIA who have been put on unlimited expenses to do what they do all-time, which is to dissimulate from morning to night, practicing on their wives and children and each other and occasionally on their opposite numbers from Russia for the big game that never comes, and secondly to have fun doing it—fun which seeps downward through the ranks like laughing gas so that even the recruits from State Tech observe themselves dashing off facetious memos in no fourth dimension as part of their class apprenticeship.
No 1, including Mailer, would suggest that this is the whole story about the CIA, about of whose work consists of clipping and pasting, as Miles Copeland's volume, Without Cloak or Dagger,six plonkingly reveals, or even the whole story about covert action. In his epilogue, Mailer claims only to be writing about his own CIA, a valid psychological structure based on the facts and concerning which he has some striking and remarkably wise insights, every bit if he has finished sowing his intellectual wild oats one time and for all.
Nonetheless, granted that a man should be allowed to do what he likes with his own CIA—and maybe the less literally accurate he is, the better for him—ane flaw remains, fifty-fifty in terms of Mailer's own construct, the seriousness of which readers may make up one's mind for themselves.
The reason the CIA attracted or at least neutralized and so many left-centrists, who would have seemed its natural critics, was its apparent enlightenment and levelheadedness in a crazy-house fourth dimension. Indeed when Joe McCarthy came sniffing around the CIA and Allen Dulles sent him packing, Dulles almost seemed to be winking at the states—you lot'd be amazed at who we're hiding in here. The CIA was indeed anti-Stalinist—wasn't everyone?—just it wasn't insane on the field of study, which was enough to make information technology seem similar Voltaire in that atmosphere.
Much of this was undoubtedly play a trick on, designed to do exactly what it did, silence the footling magazine folk, but some of information technology surely wasn't. A sure degree of sophistication, of coolness, has to accept been at the very core of a CIA man's self-definition, his unmistakable proof that he wasn't an FBI man or other primitive. And the whole signal of the real life James Angleton was that he was considered a crank by the illuminati of the agency, for his uncoolness about Communism, and those sappy plenty to follow him were referred to by same as "fundamentalists," for taking upwardly with such a Messiah. The drama of Angleton was that he was and so good at getting, or faking, results that the agency had to go along with him anyhow, until he almost took it over the edge.
Simply y'all would guess none of this from Mailer, who makes no try to differentiate Harlot'southward anti-Communism from that of the other spooks except to make it more than loftier-flown. The others, when they talk about it at all, sound like run of the mill John Birchites. Simply Harlot sounds like—Spengler!
This seems to me a fat pitch missed, and a good story untold, but it's not quite the flaw I'grand referring to, which is not then much the lack of philosophical smarts inside Mailer'south CIA (who finally cares?), as the complete lack of interest in, or apparent knowledge of global geopolitics. It is ane affair to make the game the thing to the temporary exclusion of everything else, merely information technology'southward another to deny these men fifty-fifty a few minutes of speculation about particular political situations—inappreciably a single pol is named the whole time nosotros're in Berlin for example—as if their work existed solipsistically completely outside of local politics while they gaze solemnly at something chosen World Communism and fix themselves for the Big One. By leaving out role of their brains, Mailer has allowed his characters to seem a little less serious, a little more cartoony than they need have, but he has made up for it in ways that simply he could have, and has given united states of america, if you pick your pages carefully, a quite remarkable book about them.
Source: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1991/12/05/armageddon-now/
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