Reading for My Life

by John Leonard

  But what we get instead is Harlot. Harlot seems to be Mailer’s version of James Jesus Angleton, the Fisher King of counterespionage. Like Angleton, he’s suspicious of everybody else at Langley, and was taken in by Kim Philby, and doesn’t really believe in the Sino-Soviet split. As Angleton was referred to variously at the Agency as Mother, Poet, Fisherman, and (aha!) Gray Ghost, so Montague is referred to not only as “Harlot” but also as “Trimsky” (for a Trotskylike salt-and-pepper mustache), and “Gobby” (for “God’s old beast”). Instead of orchids, rocks.

  Angleton shows up as a character in dozens of fictions, from Ludlum to Bellow. Even after he was forcibly retired in 1974, he was still obsessed that a Soviet “mole” had penetrated to the nation’s very cerebellum. Everywhere he looked, he saw “doubles.” If he could imagine it, they must be doing it. It’s with Angleton that we associate the phrase “wilderness of mirrors.” He had been, after all, a Futurist poet at Yale, and published a literary magazine, Furioso, full of difficult Modernists like Pound, whose enthusiasm for Mussolini was apparently contagious. T. S. Eliot was a buddy of young Angleton’s; Thomas Mann came to lunch. No wonder that when he looked in the Labyrinth at Langley for the pattern in the magic carpet, all he saw were “doubles” and “moles,” counterfeit identities, masks of the Other. Dostoyevsky, Conrad, Kafka, Nabokov, Wastelands: alienation of the self, by the self, against the self. And no wonder writers love him so much: What else is Modernism but Counterintelligence? Our paranoia is a text.

  In Libra, DeLillo imagines an “occult” of intelligence agencies, a “theology of secrets,” the latest in Gnostic heresies, gone to holy war against nihilism, terrorism, inauthenticity, and incoherence. Robin Winks tells us in Cloak & Gown that John Hollander, then on the Yale faculty, was so struck while reading Sir John Masterman’s The Double-Cross System by the code names in the book (Mutt and Jeff, Brutus and Bronx, Zigzag and Tricycle) that he sat down and wrote a book-length poem, Reflections on Espionage, “with spies standing for writers and thinkers, living a kind of hidden life in the actual world,” with Pound and Auden and Lowell in code.

  This is weird stuff, made to order for gonzo novelizing. But Mailer shies away from most of it, as he shies away from seeing Latin America or Europe as anything other than geographies of the Agency mind, pale-fire Zemblas. Yes, he has fun with the minor players. If Howard Hunt isn’t quite as flamboyant here as his own alter egos in his own David St. John thrillers, Bill Harvey comes on like Henderson the Rain King. The old shaman has even more fun with code names: In Berlin: BOZO, GIBLETS, SWIVET, and CATHETER. In Montevideo: AV/OCADO, AV/ANTGARDE, AV/OIRDUPOIS, AV/EMARIA. And in Miami, to sort out the bedfellowship of Mafia and Camelot in Operation HEEDLESS, Jack Kennedy is code-named IOTA, Sam Giancana is RAPUNZEL, Murphy/Exner is BLUEBEARD, and Frank Sinatra is STONEHENGE. I love it.

  But the old Druid hasn’t given Harlot enough juice to be an Angleton, a paranoid synecdoche. Harlot’s supposed to wow us, as he wows Harry, Dix, and Arnie Rosen in their early Agency days. But when he talks about a Third World still clinging “to pre-Christian realms—awe, paranoia, slavish obedience to the leader, divine punishment,” or explains that the CIA buys up bankers, psychiatrists, narcs, trade unionists, hooligans, and journalists because “our duty is to become the mind of America,” he seems to belong more to a Bill Buckley/Blackford Oakes penny dreadful than a John Le Carré requiem mass. Just once, brooding on relations between Dzerzhinsky, the godfather of the KGB, and the White Russian Yakovlev, does Harlot sound like an Angleton:

  When seduction is inspired… by the demands of power, each person will lie to the other. Sometimes, they lie to themselves. These lies often develop structures as aesthetically rich as the finest filigrees of truth. After a time, how could Yakovlev and Dzerzhinsky know when they were dealing with truth or a lie? The relationship had grown too deep. They had had to travel beyond their last clear principles. They could no longer know when they were true to themselves. The self, indeed, was in migration.

  But that is the last we hear from Harlot on this subject for another eight hundred pages. And then there’s what I take to be the crucial exchange between Harlot and Bill Harvey, although they are talking to Harry instead of each other, from opposite ends of the novel. First, we get Harlot:

  The aim is to develop teleological mind. Mind that dwells above the facts; mind that leads us to larger purposes. Harry, the world is going through exceptional convulsions. The twentieth century is fearfully apocalyptic. Historical constitutions that took centuries to develop are melting into lava. Those 1917 Bolsheviks were the first intimation. Then came the Nazis. God, they were a true exhalation from Hell. The top of the mountain blew off. Now the lava is starting to move…. Lava is entropy. It reduces all systems. Communism is the entropy of Christ, the degeneration of higher spiritual forms into lower ones. To oppose it, we must, therefore, create a fiction—that the Soviets are a mighty military machine who will overpower us unless we are more powerful. The truth is that they will overpower us if the passion to resist them is not regenerated, by will if necessary, every year, every minute.

  Later, it’s Harvey, larger-than-life like DeLillo’s David Ferrie, a paranoid’s paranoid:

  There is opposition to entropy. The universe may not necessarily wind down. There is something forming that I would call the new embodiment. Entropy and embodiment may be as related as antimatter and matter…. Yes, the forms deteriorate and they all run down to the sea, but other possibilities come together in their wake to seek embodiment. Blobs are always looking to articulate themselves into a higher form of blob. There is a tropism toward form, Hubbard. It counters decomposition.

  What does this mean? Jason Epstein has found me wanting. On Mailer’s last page, we are told that Harlot is Harry’s embodiment, but otherwise this sounds remarkably like one of those rough beasts slouching out of a Yeats poem to be born-again, a mystagogic man-god. And Harry has gone to Moscow to sit at Dzerzhinsky’s feet, and this embodiment of Harlot would seem to be whispering that God is the Ultimate Spy, that evolution is just a Cover Story, that the universe is basically Disinformation. Maybe, but the novel itself has no more got us to such a realization than it has bothered to flesh in the migration of Harry from the innocence of Lovett in Barbary Shore to the savage savvy of Rojack, that American Dreamer. And I can’t help identifying with a character in DeLillo’s White Noise, the ex-wife of the professor of Hitler Studies, whose job it is to review books for the CIA, “mainly long serious novels with coded structures.”

  Curiously, yet logically, there is one vice… that tempts both narcissist and psychopath. It is treachery.

  —Kittredge

  I like Modene more than Kittredge, who is Omega to Harry’s Alpha. Besides being a tease, Kittredge is snotty. She hates Lenny Bruce, makes fun of A. J. Ayer, and condescends to Freud. Harry has his doubts about her, too, wondering if she began her affair with him “because she wanted to learn whether she could run an operation under [Harlot’s] nose and get away with it.”

  This cross-referencing of sex and espionage is one of the novel’s principal conceits. Harlot tells his boys: “Our studies move into penetralia. We search for the innermost sanctum, ‘the shuddering penetralia of caves.’” The old Orgone Boxer is asking us to think of spies as voyeurs; of the double-backed beast as another double agent; of adultery as a sort of treason; of sex itself as quest and conspiracy, guerrilla warfare and the coup d’état. Our behavior in history has a lot to do with our behavior in bed. Politics is a sex crime. Imperialism is a gang bang.

  Sex can also be divine: Coupling with Kittredge, Harry tells us, is a “sacrament,” letting him “see God when the lightning flashed and we jolted our souls into one another.” And sex, of course, is death: Harry smells “the whiff of murder beyond every embrace of love”; Sam and Modene even make it in a graveyard, on top of his dead wife’s mausoleum.

  It seems to me that the trouble with sex as the ground of being is that it puts too much of a burde
n on sex; we all still have to go to work in the morning, even spies. But I’m not ready yet to discuss Mailer and sex. That comes last. What about Alpha and Omega?

  Well, according to Kittredge, they aren’t metaphors. They are, in each of us, separate unconsciousnesses, with their own egos and superegos. Alpha is our male component, “creature of the forward-swimming energies of sperm, ambitious, blind to all but its own purposes… more oriented toward enterprise, technology, grinding the corn, repairing the mill, building the bridges between money and power, und so weiter.” Whereas Omega, our female component, “originated in the ovum and so knows more about the mysteries—conception, birth, death, night, the moon, eternity, karma, ghosts, divinities, myths, magic, our primitive past, and so on.”

  In other words, double the trouble and goose the guilt, but also someone else to blame it on when things go wrong. What isn’t right-brained/left-brained in this, or gussied-up Carl Jung, or old-fashioned schizophrenia, seems, as so often happens when the vapors take Mailer, to be a kind of Trojan zebra, foisting more of his Manichaean dualisms on the unwary reader—courage and fear, sex and death, Alpha and Omega, Simon and Garfunkel—the way Aristotle once foisted the unconscious dualisms of Greek grammar on an unsuspecting cosmos.

  What the hey. If Yeats can believe in faeries, Pound in funny money, Doris Lessing in flying saucers, and Saul Bellow in Rudolf Steiner, the old Rosicrucian has a right to his Alphas and Omegas, however much they remind me of Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden: “The theological ideas which Auden does not adopt but invents are all too often on the level of those brownpaper parcels brought secretly to the War Department in times of national emergency, which turn out to be full of plans to destroy enemy submarines by tracking them down with seals.”

  But Mailer as usual is out to get Freud. Freud, says the insufferable Kittredge, “really had no more philosophy than a Stoic. That’s not enough. Stoics make good plumbers. The drains go bad and you’ve got to hold your nose and fix them. End of Freud’s philosophy. If people and civilization don’t fit—which we all know anyway—why, says Freud, make the best of a bad lot.”

  This is bumptious. It omits, among many other important matters, Freud’s tragic pessimism. Okay, the guy was saying that civilization depends on a certain amount of repression of the instincts, and Mailer would like to think that he operates entirely on instinct, so he’s bound to resent this bad news, as well as civilization, at least since the Enlightenment. (Mailer belongs, in fact, to Isaiah Berlin’s team of anti-Enlightenment “swimmers against the current” like Vico and Hamann and Herder, like Moses Hess and Georges Sorel.) But you’d think that as much as he identified in Ancient Evenings with Menenhetep on the Boat of Ra, he’d identify even more with a brave pariah who dropped by bathysphere into himself to see why people hurt the way they do; the dream-decoder; the first Deconstructionist. Isn’t this Mailer’s own detective method, a consulting of the suspect self, plowing through magnetic fields, lighting up the wounds of God?

  Besides, Harry in Harlot’s Ghost has to kill off two fathers.

  I wish the old Kabbalist had spent less time thinking about Hemingway, and no time writing about Marilyn, and some years working through Freud, after which he could take on Marx, thus killing off, instead of kissing off, both his fathers. (Anyway, if Jean-Paul Sartre could churn out eight hundred pages on Freud when John Huston asked him for a screenplay, think what Mailer might have managed, especially with his old buddy Montgomery Clift as Sigmund.) Nor has he really ever answered the shrewd question put to him by an interviewer in Pieces and Pontifications: “Why can’t the unconscious be as error prone as the conscious?”

  Just because Kittredge had ghostsex with the pirate-shade of Augustus Farr, who “submitted me to horrors,” doesn’t mean Harry has to heed her every fatuity. He’s better off listening to Chevi Fuentes. Among other good advices, Fuentes warns Harry against the labyrinth-maker Jorge Luis Borges: “Never read him. In five pages, in any of his five pages, he will summarize for you the meaninglessness of the next ten years of your life. Your life, particularly.”

  Capitalism, says Fuentes, is essentially psychopathic. It lives for the moment. It can plan far ahead only at the expense of its own vitality, and all larger questions of morality are delegated to patriotism, religion, or psychoanalysis. “That is why I am a capitalist,” he says. “Because I am a psychopath. Because I am greedy. Because I want instant consumer satisfaction. If I have spiritual problems, I either go to my priest and obtain absolution or I pay an analyst to convince me over the years that my greed is my identity and I have rejoined the human race. I may feel bad about my selfishness but I will get over it. Capitalism is a profound solution to the problem of how to maintain a developed society. It recognizes the will-to-power in all of us.”

  Chevi used to be a Communist back in Montevideo, before Harry “turned” him. By the time he tells Harry that he’s a capitalist, in Miami, Chevi has also become a homosexual. Listen up:

  You will judge me adversely for being a homosexual, yet it is you who is more of one than any of us, although you will never admit it to yourself because you never practice! You are a homosexual the way Americans are barbarians although they do not practice barbarism openly. They keep their newspaper in front of the light. They go to church so as not to face death, and you work for your people so that you will not have to scrutinize yourself in the mirror.

  Our Harry? What’s going on? Sure, Kittredge is a drag. Still, isn’t there Modene? But something, at the very least androgynous, seems to have happened to Mailer since he came back from Egypt. If you used to worry about his preoccupation with anal sex, as we all of course have worried about Updike’s preoccupation with oral sex, you are entitled to worry even more.

  In Berlin in 1956, after taking him to a seedy S and M bar where the house speciality is “the golden shower,” Dix Butler, Agency übermensch, makes a pass at Harry. Harry declines this invitation, not because he isn’t excited, but because he fears such an act would oblige him “to live forever on this side of sex.” Dix goes both ways, we are told, because he was raped as a child by his brother. But later it’s clear that Arnie Rosen, another of Harry’s schoolmates in Langley’s entering class of 1955, is also gay, and by choice, although forced in the fifties to be furtive.

  This isn’t to suggest that the CIA goes in for ritual pederasty—as seems to have been the case among Spartans, Celts, and the Sambia of New Guinea, if you believe Rick Fields in The Code of the Warrior—though it’s not hard to imagine, at the Agency, as in prep school, a homoerotic bonding of the blue-eyed boys, reading their spagyrics and their necromantiums, pulling on their Tomar Towers and their Luxor Obelisks, speaking their Vattan cryptosystems. To join the eighteenth-century Bavarian Illuminati, you underwent a trial by a knife. Their candles were black, their hoods were white, and they bound up your testicles with a poppy-colored cordon: standard Skull and Bones hotstuff. However, I digress.

  No. Mailer evokes the fugitive sensibility as yet another metaphor for the secret life: undercover, as it were; the double or fictitious identity. But think for a minute about Chevi. In being “turned,” wasn’t he raped, like Dix? And hasn’t he seen Harry in action on another front, too, smitten by the notorious prostitute Libertad, who turns out to be a hermaphrodite? And, suddenly, one begins to wonder what all these men, like STONEHENGE and RAPUNZEL, are really up to. And I must explain the Tequila Sunrise Paradigm.

  In the movie Tequila Sunrise, Mel Gibson and Kurt Russell are high-school buddies who grew up on opposite sides of the law. They compete for Michelle Pfeiffer. If not to them, what’s clear to us is that Gibson and Russell really want to go to bed with each other. Since they can’t, they go to bed with Pfeiffer. She’s the go-between, the trampoline, a universal joint, a portable gopher hole, a surrogate, and a Chinese finger puzzle. Once you have seen it in the movie, you’ll see it everywhere. In Pynchon’s Vineland, for instance, it’s obvious that Vond, the fascistic prosecutor, is murmuring to Zoyd, th
e rock piano player, through the holes in poor Frenesi’s body. The Tequila Sunrise Paradigm might even explain serial killers like Bateman in American Psycho, unless you believe that when Yuppie Bateman rapes the Aspen waitress with the can of hair spray, nails Bethany’s fingers to the hardwood floor, and sodomizes a severed head, he is really criticizing Late Capitalism and the Fetishism of Commodities. (And I’m the king of Bavaria.)

  Now take a look at the relationships in Harlot’s Ghost, not just among Harlot and Harry and Kittredge and Dix, or Dix and Harry and Chevi and Modene, or Modene, Jack, Frank, and Marilyn, but, let’s say, historically. Just suppose that Sam Giancana really wanted to go to bed with Frank Sinatra, and Sinatra wanted to go to bed with Jack Kennedy, and Kennedy wanted to go to bed with everybody, including that “beautiful animal,” Fidel Castro. And Marilyn and Modene (or Judith) were the closest they could get, except, of course, for an invasion. There is no question, even in the pages of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., that the Kennedy Boys had a hard-on for Castro.