Reading for My Life

by John Leonard

  Last summer in Prague, Czech writers complained to us that not only had Kundera deserted them, but he was so busy designing himself a Nobel Prize, he hadn’t managed to say a word on the Velvet Revolution, when history resumed, not having come to the end he had predicted; and so did European culture, but strangely without him. I don’t know when he finished Immortality—the copyright is 1990—and therefore can’t tell you whether he chose deliberately to ignore this astonishing and essentially nonviolent sea change, or it arrived too late to be thought about this time around, or he no longer cares at all anymore. Besides, Czech writers gripe a lot.

  But history doesn’t end; it can’t; it’s internalized, in nations and cultures and families and lovers. There’s no reason to believe that we don’t evolve, for better or worse, in the history of our cultures like the species in its Darwinian messiness, as much a consequence of chance, contingency, compromise, and quirk, as of necessity or design; with some adaptations that are nifty, and some inefficient, and some full of surprising surplus value. Surely cultures are their own feedback loop, susceptible to Chaos and Catastrophe Theory, capable of rearranging themselves in a hot flash after an idea or a bomb, like Islam, the Mafia, or the party line. And surely individual citizens tend to recapitulate the culture, as ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Or fractals… but let’s not get into fractals. A Khmer Rouge was implicit in the brutal kings and the tenth-century Cambodian command economy of slaves that created in the jungle a sandstone cosmology and a vision of thirty-two hells, those golden lions, golden Buddhas, dancing girls, corncob towers, and serpent cults, which is probably why Pol Pot let stand so undisturbed those temples and tombs, the bare ruined choirs of Angkor Wat. Maybe despair, like so much else, is cyclic, millennial.

  I can be lofty, too. For that matter, it doesn’t seem to me that kitsch is anything new. What else are folk songs and fairy tales, lullabies and festivals, the shinbones of saints for sale on the roads to the cathedrals, or the comfort stations of the miraculous, in the Middle Ages? Wasn’t “imagology” invented by great religions? Didn’t the media, by sympathetic magic, help make possible what happened, another Eroica, in Eastern Europe in 1989? And yet in his very own bare ruined choirs, Milan Kundera feels himself beached; and this vastation he patrols in a canary yellow Spenglerian doom buggy.

  What we get in Immortality, instead of any Czechoslovakia, is a lot of Goethe. Why, you may wonder, so much Goethe? For two reasons. First, he was

  the great center… a firm center that holds both extremes in a remarkable balance that Europe will never know again. As a young man, Goethe studied alchemy, and later became one of the first modern scientists. Goethe was the greatest German of all, and at the same time an antipatriotic and a European. Goethe was a cosmopolitan, and yet throughout his life he hardly ever stirred out of his province, his little Weimar. Goethe was a man of nature, yet also a man of history. In love, he was a libertine as well as a romantic. And something else… Goethe knew how and with what materials his house had been constructed, he knew why his oil lamp gave off light, he knew the principle of the telescope with which he and Bettina looked at Jupiter…. The world of technical objects was open and intelligible to him.

  Not since Mann has another writer wanted so much as Milan to reincarnate Weimar’s wise guy, trashed by Modernism. (Never mind that Kundera belongs more to Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century than to Weimar on the straddle of the eighteenth/nineteenth: to Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Secessionists. His novels are peopled with Schieles and the wild-haired women of Klimt.)

  The second reason for so much Goethe is that Kundera has borrowed, with credit, his brand-new role for women right out of Part II of Faust. According to Paul at the swimming pool on top of Paris, “Woman is the future of man.” (Without knowing it, though Kundera does, Paul quotes Aragon.) Paul has been drinking and thinking about his daughter and his granddaughter:

  Either woman will become man’s future or mankind will perish, because only woman is capable of nourishing within her an unsubstantiated hope and inviting us to a doubtful future, which we would have long ceased to believe in were it not for women. All my life I’ve been willing to follow their voice, even though that voice is mad, and whatever else I may be I am not a madman. But nothing is more beautiful than when someone who isn’t mad goes into the unknown, led by a mad voice…Das Ewigweibliche zieht uns hinan! The eternal feminine draws us on!

  How seriously are we supposed to take this? Not very. Paul, after all, the “simpleton of ambiguity,” is the one who says it. Kundera can’t help adding that “Goethe’s verse, like a proud white goose, flapped its wings beneath the vault of the swimming pool.” I can no more imagine this novelist buying into the Eternal Feminine than I can see him abandoning the (dead) cultures of the great cities for some woodsy totem worship under the sign of Gaia, the Mother of Titans. And the last thing women need done to them, anyway, is another abstraction, another metaphor.

  But where does that leave the severed head? Being melancholy, being brilliant, dreaming of gestures. As much as Thomas Mann at the end, he reminds me of Vladimir Nabokov—another exile, another Bolshie-basher, another father-phile, another disdainer of the determinisms of Marx and Freud, another sacred monster of immortal art, opposed to the very idea of a “future,” inventor of Zemblas. Nabokov’s magic kits were also full of masks and mirrors, artist-madmen and artist-criminals, insanity and suicide, strangled wives and slaughtered sons and debauched nymphets. But I am also reminded, more surprisingly, of Ingmar Bergman.

  What tales Bergman tells on himself in his autobiography. He grew up on masks and ghosts and guilt and Strindberg. Death instead of a cuckoo popped out of the clock in the dining room. His first memory is of vomit. His prayers to get rid of pimples and stop his masturbating “stank of anguish, entreaty, trust, loathing, and despair.” He hated a brother, tried to kill a sister, almost never sees his many children by his several wives. When he sleeps, he’s afflicted by loathsome dreams: “murder, torture, suffocation, incest, destruction, insane anger.” Insomnia is worse: “Flocks of black birds come and keep me company: anxiety, rage, shame, regret….” Autoanalysis, Lear-like rage, a madness to see through prison walls to an absent God: The greatest movie director in the history of the world has found the only cure for his dread of the dark in “film as dream, film and music…. The mute or speaking shadows turn without evasion towards my most secret room. The smell of hot metal, the wavering picture, the rattle of the Maltese cross, the handle against my hand.” All this compensatory genius, from a little boy afraid to die in the dark.

  I think Immortality is Kundera’s The Seventh Seal, a game against death. I think he’d feel bad anywhere, like Bergman. (I am also charmed by the title of Bergman’s autobiography, The Magic Lantern, which was, of course, the name of the theater where Havel, and the rest of the Czechs who hadn’t left Prague, sat down to revise their social contract, to write a civil society instead of a novel.) Kundera jumped ship before it suddenly set sail into new meanings and new beings. All his borders are scheduled to disappear next year. Somewhere Marx says that when the train of history turns a corner, all the thinkers fall off. This included Marx. And Kundera. And many other lonely severed heads.

  Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost

  IN 1976 IN New York magazine, Mailer sneezed black-magic metaphors all over Watergate and the CIA, Marilyn Monroe and Howard Hughes, Kafka and the Mormons. At once a shaman and an exorcist, he changed shapes and split the lips of his wound: “Is America governed by accident more than we are ready to suppose, or by design? And if by design, is the design secret?”

  Trying to understand whether our real history is public or secret, exposed or—at the highest level—underground, is equal to exploring the opposite theaters of our cynicism and our paranoia…. What a crazy country we inhabit. What a harlot. What a brute. She squashes sausage out of the minds of novelists on their hotfooted way to a real good plot.

  Harlot’s Ghost is the elephantias
is of that article: a lot of sausage, spicy and nourishing as far as it goes, but not going far enough. On the book’s own calendar, it’s still short twenty years. Mailer will try to talk his way around this gap. His editor, Jason Epstein, has already told the New York Times that Harlot’s Ghost is a “test for reviewers—one that I fear will find many of them wanting.” But this is preemptive condescension. After thirteen hundred pages of often brilliant tease—Popol Vuh and Victorian gothic, Vico and Nietzsche, Italian opera and Mahler symphony, Book of Kells and Book of the Dead—Mailer fails to deliver the ultimate intimacy. TO BE CONTINUED, he tells us, but we’ve waited almost as long for his CIA novel as we waited for his Egyptian novel and it’s like waiting for Zapata or the Red Sox.

  I was not in the CIA to become a bureaucrat but a hero.

  —Harry Hubbard

  Suppose Julien Sorel had joined the CIA instead of the Roman Catholic Church, or C. P. Snow had written Strangers and Brothers about modern-day Templar spooks instead of social-climbing slide rules. The “Company” may be America’s Prep School and Episcopal Church, our Counterreformation and our Fourth Crusade, but it is also Norman Mailer’s spirit world—his Scathach and Xibalda, his Jigoku and Jahannam, his karmavacara and his Universal Baseball Association.

  Just kidding. Or am I? “Irrationality,” Mailer says, “is the only great engine of history.” So much for the class struggle. Skip the next several paragraphs if you hate a plot synopsis.

  New England blueblood Herrick “Harry” Hubbard joins the CIA in 1955, fresh out of Yale and “as pretty as Montgomery Clift.” He is joining his father “Cal” (a Robert Lowell reference I don’t pretend to fathom) and his godfather “Harlot” (Hugh Tremont Montague, who brightened Harry’s boyhood by teaching him to climb rocks). Harry is posted to Berlin at the time of the Tunnel, where he consorts with pistol-packing William King Harvey; to Montevideo, where he trafficks with the Arbenz-bashing E. Howard Hunt; to Miami, in time for the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis, and Operation Mongoose, where he beds down with playgirl Modene Murphy (an avatar of Judith Campbell Exner), thus communing with Sam Giancana, Frank Sinatra, Jack Kennedy, Fidel Castro, Howard Hughes, and Marilyn Monroe. What happens to Harry after the assassination of JFK is not entirely clear because most of it’s been omitted. A thirteen-hundred-page novel about the CIA leaves out Vietnam, Watergate, Nicaragua, and Iranamok, not to mention running drugs, laundering money, and fingering Mandela. This much, we are vouchsafed:

  Between 1964 and 1984, Harry saves the life of Harlot’s wife, Hadley Kittredge Gardiner Montague, who is not only “an absolute beauty,” a Jackie Kennedy look-alike, but also a “genius” who develops her own anti-Freudian theory of personality while working of course for the CIA. After Harlot kills his son and cripples himself climbing more metaphorical rocks, Harry steals Kittredge for himself, while continuing to counterspy for Harlot. In 1984, Kittredge, in turn, is stolen by Dix Butler, an Agency “asset” and bisexual megabucks übermensch, and Harlot’s body, with its face shot off, washes up from Chesapeake Bay. Did Harlot kill himself? Was he murdered? Or has he, in fact, defected to the KGB? Harry leaves Maine for Moscow, to find out. In Moscow, among these many mystifications, he is abandoned by his Creator. And that’s all I’m going to tell you because from now on, instead of reviewing this novel, I intend to haunt it, like the pirate ghost Augustus Farr, like the CIA in America’s kinky closet. (We are spooked!)

  What, indeed, did Picasso teach us if not that every form offers up its own scream when it is torn?

  —Norman Mailer

  We learn about the trouble with Harry from two manuscripts— a shortie called “Omega,” set in Orwell’s 1984, and a gargantua called “Alpha,” maybe the longest flashback in world literature, covering everything else up to 1964. These manuscripts correspond to the two halves of the human psyche as identified by Kittredge for the CIA. They also try out almost every narrative form known to the Mother Russian Novel: picaresque and epistolary; Bildungsroman and roman à clef; the historical, the gothic, the pornographic; the thriller and the western. There are also journal-jottings, cable traffic, interoffice memoranda, and transcripts of wiretaps.

  For so many species of story, there are as many tics of prose; seizures and afflatus. When his battery’s charged, Mailer windmills from one paragraph to the next—baroque, anal, Talmudic, olfactory, portentous, loopy, coy, Egyptian; down and dirty in the cancer, the aspirin or the plastic; shooting moons on sheer vapor; blitzed by paranoia and retreating for a screen pass, as if bitten in the pineal gland by a deranged Swinburne, with metaphors so meaning-moistened that they stick to our thumbs, with “intellections” (as he once put it) slapped on “like adhesive plasters.” When he chooses to, he also speaks in tongues. Harlot sounds like Whittaker Chambers. Modene Murphy sounds like Lauren Bacall. Bill Harvey sounds like L. Ron Hubbard or Lyndon LaRouche. The guilt-ridden Uruguayan double agent Chevi Fuentes sounds like Frantz Fanon and Octavio Paz. Harry sounds like Rousseau’s Emile when he isn’t sounding like Wilhelm Reich, and Kittredge sounds like Flaubert’s Salammbo when she isn’t sounding like Hannah Arendt, and together they sound like Nichols and May. And everybody sounds like Mailer, as if picking up quasar signals from Sirius the Dog Star through a plate in the head; as if bodies, vegetables, and objects all had distinctive vibrations, special stinks and personal divinities, angels in the meatloaf, demons in the Tupperware. Even money comes “in all kinds of emotional flavors.” Ghosts! Pirates! Indians! Animism! Alchemy!

  You either like this stuff or you don’t, and I do.

  Nor are the usual obsessions neglected, like boxing, bulls, and booze. And Marilyn Monroe: Harry’s father, Cal, has a theory that Hoffa bumped her off, hoping to pin the rap on Bobby. And Hemingway: Cal says he beat Papa at arm wrestling one dark and stormy Stork Club night. And LSD: Kittredge seems to have invented it in a lab at Langley. And Martin Buber: I’m convinced Mailer has rendered Harry, for all his Waspishness, “one-eighth” Jewish just so Harlot can tell him to read Tales of the Hasidim. And of course manhood: Like all Mailermen, who are happiest in motion, in boats, and in beds, Harry finds that “happiness is experienced most directly in the intervals between terror,” which may be “our simple purpose on earth.” If we “surmount that terror… we can, perhaps, share some of God’s fear.”

  This means a lot of rock climbing, some polo, and an invasion of Cuba. Thinks Harry:

  So many of these soldiers had spent their lives getting ready for a great moment—it was as if one lived as a vestal virgin who would be allowed to copulate just once but in a high temple: The act had better be transcendent, or one had chosen the wrong life.

  If this Prep School Ethos is hard on Kittredge, tough darts:

  I gave up the thought of explaining to her that the natural condition of men’s lives was fear of tests, physical even more than mental tests. Highly developed skills of evasion went into keeping ourselves removed from the center of our cowardice…. So I could not help it—I admired men who were willing to live day by day with bare-wire fear even if it left them naked as drunks, incompetent wild men, accident-prone. I understood the choice.

  It’s even harder on Castro, but he’s so Neolithic macho, he will surely understand:

  I would mourn Fidel if we succeeded, mourn him in just the way a hunter is saddened by the vanished immanence of the slain beast. Yes, one fired a bullet into beautiful animals in order to feel nearer to God: To the extent that we were criminal, we could approach the cosmos only by stealing a piece of the Creation.

  You need no longer wonder: Why Are We in Vietnam? Or Iraq. Or Marilyn Monroe.

  I could say, to stretch a point, that we were being schooled in minor arts of sorcery. Are not espionage and magic analagous?

  —Harlot

  If paranoia is our culture’s weather, all that lightning, then Mailer, bless him, puts up a kite instead of an umbrella. But having grown up on him, we already know that we have enemies. It’s harder to amaze us. It’s a tough br
eak for the old exorcist that Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, and Stan Lee in Dunn’s Conundrum have already covered so much of his territory; that Robin Winks has already written his book about Yale and the CIA; that Tom Mangold has just published a biography of James Jesus Angleton; that Robert Gates twists in the Senate wind; that Pete Brewton’s S&L stories, and the magnitiude of the BCCI scandal, are so much more fantastic to contemplate than the CIA conspiracy in Harlot’s Ghost to finance itself by cashing in on insider tips on when the Federal Reserve Board is about to fiddle with the interest rates. What’s new, Norman?

  Well, he really likes these guys. And why not? If you can identify with Gary Gilmore, not to mention Menenhetet, how hard can it be to identify with Allen Dulles? Besides, the old Social Bandit has been soft on WASPs since the moonshot, when he mindmelded with the astronauts. And he’s summered forever in New England with its sermons, charades, and whalingship watergames. Of course: Harry will lose his innocence and Harry is America—that’s the point of these many pages—but what a boys’ club it seems to him at the start, what a Skull and Bones, a safe house, a happy hunting ground of Hopelites, Berserkirs and Samurai, storm-cloud Maruts and Taoist warrior-sages, Gilgamesh, Achilles, Arjuna, Crazy Horse—with secret books, sacred seals, and nifty computer graphics. It’s Rosicrucian, Kabbalistic, Druidical! I mean, they have castles on the Rhône, châteaux in the Loire, temples in Kyoto. Why not great Baals with glowing redhot bellies and Tantric miniatures depicting Kundalini; Nuremberg Maidens with heartsful of nails; ramsing, the horn of Tugs, hanging from a banyan; the altar of sacrifice to Yaldaboath; menhirs, tesseracts, an orgone box, a Swedenborg deathmask, a black Celtic virgin (for Sergius O’Shaughnessy) and, in the reliquary, the foreskin of Hermes Trismegistus? (I’m sorry; it’s catching.)