It is no wonder that Mailer gave up his plan to chronicle the voyage of the spaceship-ark in favor of a novel of sharply etched character studies, none more so than Montague’s, a master spy modeled on the legendary CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton (himself a minor character in the book), a poet who corresponded with Pound and Eliot, collaborated during World War II with cardinals, ex-fascists, Mafia capodecinas, and Kim Philby, and worked for seven successive CIA directors. It was Angleton who came up with the “wilderness of mirrors” theory to explain how Soviet intelligence might be manipulating the agency. Mailer’s Montague is just as fiercely determined to root out Russian moles as his model, or so it seems—with Montague, there is always a deeper layer, and his deepest loyalties are a mystery.
The novel begins in 1983 just before his body is found near his boat in Chesapeake Bay with most of the head blown off by a shotgun (Hemingway is one of the novel’s presiding spirits), and the fingertips nibbled off by fish. A filling in one of the remaining two teeth corresponds “astonishingly well,” to the Xrays in Harlot’s dental file. Is it Harlot or a corpse of similar dimensions tricked up to deceive? Harry disappears himself and goes to Russia to find the answer. He carries with him the “Alpha manuscript,” subtitled “The Game,” a 1,000-page memoir of his life in the CIA from 1955 to the mid-1960s. As he reads his microfilm copy of the memoir with a flashlight on the wall of his room in the Hotel Metropole, we read along with him. Down the street is Lubyanka Square, dominated by a gigantic statue of “Iron” Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Russian secret police and one of the most dazzling twentieth-century practitioners of counterintelligence. Harlot gives seminars on Dzerzhinsky’s techniques.
In his appended “Author’s Note,” to the novel, Mailer said his intention was to present “a large and detailed mural of a social organism moving through some real historical events,” as well as through imagined ones, his claim being that novelists “can create superior histories out of an enhancement of the real.” To accomplish this, massive research was necessary. His bibliography lists 130 books. When it got to the point that an easily consulted overview was needed, he turned to Judith, who was reading the source materials right along with him. Using three twenty-eight-by-twenty-two-inch pieces of heavy stock, Judith created an event timeline, running from 1940 to 1980. Across the top, she listed seventeen different people (Angleton, Harvey, Hoover, Hunt, Philby, Allen Dulles, and other top CIA operatives, Lee Harvey Oswald, Marilyn Monroe, Sam Giancana and his colleagues, and several Russian spies and/or counterspies), and five event categories (Watergate, Cuba, Vietnam, CIA Mind Control, and World Events). Mailer’s scrawled additions, corrections, and notes on the charts are easily distinguished from her elegant script. Later, a further consolidation was made on a fourth chart, clustering some of the key events of the novel. Characteristically, he saw the novel more in terms of the characters and their actions, fair and foul, than from the perspective of events.
The timeline charts, which were taped together and propped up near Mailer’s desk for easy reference, show that he planned the novel to cover the four decades from the beginning of World War II—the first events noted are the assassination of Leon Trotsky in August 1940 and the start of the German bombing of London a few weeks later—to the beginning of the end of the Cold War—the last event noted is the signing of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty II by President Carter in June 1979. But Mailer never reached the later events on his timelines, and the novel effectively ends with the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The assassination of JFK takes place offstage, as it were, and while the novel continues to 1966, it barely does so.
He worked deliberately all through 1988 and by the end of the year had 1,300 pages of manuscript. His routine was to work four to six days at his New York studio, pack up his books and the timelines, drive to Provincetown for a week, and then return. One of the few breaks he took was for the ecumenical wedding ceremony of his daughter Betsy, who married Frank Nastasi in New York on February 14, 1988, and the large reception he and Norris hosted at 142 Columbia Heights. He also found time to go to two big fights. After Muhammad Ali’s retirement, Mike Tyson was arguably the most impressive heavyweight boxer, and in 1988 was the undisputed world champion at the peak of his career. Tyson’s first match was against former champion Larry Holmes, who came out of retirement for the bout. Mailer and Norris flew from the West Side of Manhattan to Atlantic City on one of Donald Trump’s black helicopters. Mailer sat in the back row with Jack Nicholson where they discussed Prizzi’s Honor, a film about a hit man and hit woman who fall in love. He told Nicholson that “if two people are equally murderous, they could really be in love.” Tyson demolished Holmes and won the fight with a TKO in the fourth. In June, Mailer took his son Michael with him to Atlantic City to watch Tyson knock out Michael Spinks in the first round. He wrote about Tyson’s amazing punching power in a September essay in Spin magazine, his last report on a professional bout.
Except for two advance excerpts from Harlot’s Ghost, one in Esquire and the other in Playboy, the only other piece Mailer published in 1988 was an endorsement of Rev. Jesse Jackson for the Democratic nomination for president. It was Jackson’s second run for the nomination and, for a short period, he led the eventual candidate, Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, in delegates. His endorsement appeared on the New York Times op-ed page the day before the April 19 primary. New York Mayor Ed Koch had said that any Jew who voted for Jackson was “crazy.” Mailer took exception, and deplored Koch’s statement as an example of small-minded political self-interest.
Although centuries of ghetto life had engendered in the Jews “a noble spirit alive in enough of us to permit the feeling that we were the first children of the Enlightenment,” Mailer wrote, the “fearful curse” of Nazism was “still there to poison one’s finer moral substance.” The destruction of half the Jews in the world had created “an imperative to survive at all costs.” The Holocaust “left us smaller, greedier, narrower, preternaturally touchy, and self-seeking.” Politics for the Jews, he argued, too often boiled down to the question: “Is this good for the Jews?”
It takes no great insight to recognize that oppression of the spirit is the meanest poverty of them all. We have descended from Shakespeare’s parlous defense of the Jew as being able to bleed to Ed Koch’s inaccurate assumption—I hope it is inaccurate—that we are, by now, conditioned reflexes—that is, machines, buttons for a politician to press. If-any-Jew-who-votes-for-Jackson-is-crazy proves to be a useful political button, then I say we Jews have become machines and can no longer look at serious matters by their true merits, or face up to fundamental problems.
Mailer’s greatest concern was that the country would not be able to solve “any of our worst problems in organic fashion until a black man does become president.” Jackson, he concluded, was the best candidate to bring out “the potential love of black and white for each other.” Nationally, Jackson came in second to Dukakis, and lost to him in New York state, but in New York City Jackson defeated him by a few thousand votes. Mailer’s endorsement may have been a factor, especially in Manhattan.
Mailer returned to Harlot’s Ghost with few interruptions for the rest of the year. When Joyce Carol Oates sent him a story she had published, he said he would have to defer the pleasure of reading it, and gave an explanation he used on several occasions: “Reading good work when you’re writing something of your own is like watching a marvelous Ferrari drive by while you have the parts of your own car spread over the garage floor. So I don’t read good writers while I’m working.”
There were exceptions to this rule, however. Mailer admired Don DeLillo and read his novel about Lee Harvey Oswald, Libra, when it was published in August. They had met a few years earlier when Mailer had invited him to a reading at the Actors Studio. DeLillo had no idea that Mailer knew of him and his work, and was surprised to receive the invitation. He recalled that in 1959 when he was a struggling young writer, he found a copy of
Advertisements for Myself in a desk drawer at the advertising agency where he worked.
I found it and I started reading it. I don’t think I owned a single hardcover book, and now I had one, except for old school textbooks. I thought it was terrific. I still have that copy. I just ingested it. I read it at home and every subject one might try to explore had been explored by Mailer in this book—speaking, writing, arguing.
Before the reading at the Actors Studio, the two novelists chatted a bit, DeLillo said, and “in my awkwardness I found myself saying something I would never have said under another circumstance. I told him I was writing a novel about Lee Harvey Oswald, and it had an effect on him. I saw this in his face, obviously.” After Mailer read Libra, he wrote to DeLillo with praise.
What a terrific book. I have to tell you that I read it against the grain. I’ve got an awfully long novel going on the CIA, and of course it overlapped just enough that I kept saying, “this son of a bitch is playing my music,” but I was impressed, damned impressed, which I very rarely am. I think we keep ourselves writing by allowing the core of our vanity never to be scratched if we can help it, but I didn’t get away scot-free this time. Wonderful virtuoso stuff all over the place, and, what is more, I think you’re fulfilling the task we’ve just about all forgotten, which is that we’re here to change the American obsessions—those black holes in space—into mantras that we can live with. What you’ve given us [is] a comprehensible, believable, vision of what Oswald was like, and what Ruby was like, one that could conceivably have happened. Whether history will find you more wrong than right is hardly to the point: what counts is that you brought life back to a place in our imagination that has been surviving all these years like scorched earth, that is, just about. It’s so rare when novel writing offers us this deep purpose and I swear, Don, I salute you for it.
A few years later, after he had finished Harlot’s Ghost, Mailer told DeLillo that Libra had saved him five hundred pages, presumably by allowing him to leave out any exploration of the motives and actions of Oswald. He had been given one more year to turn in the final manuscript. Random House, he said, “has been damn decent to me, and I’d like to return the favor,” so he was stripping down his life to the “essentials of a fighter’s camp” to meet the deadline.
FOR SEVERAL YEARS, Mailer had been corresponding with a writer from Providence, an English professor named Edward McAlice who had an Irish flair for language. They met only a couple of times, but wrote regularly. Mailer read McAlice’s manuscripts for over twenty years, offering advice and encouragement, and also enlisted Judith McNally to give him feedback. McAlice was one of scores of aspiring writers that he helped. Writing to him in early February 1989, Mailer lauded one of his phrases—“all the steaming shit and foul midden pools,” noting that he had “said the same thing about this and that condition a hundred times, but never as well.” He also praised his “power to characterize people in four or five lines,” which he compared to that of Gabriel García Márquez. “Me,” he said, “I can’t get someone through a door without blowing a thousand words.” Mailer was feeling bogged down. “The wind had better be breezing up,” he told McAlice, because he was only half done with a novel that was due in a year.
At that time, he was writing about his narrator, Harry Hubbard, a young CIA agent posted to Uruguay, where Howard Hunt was the CIA station chief. Mailer could have sent Hubbard anywhere, but assigned him to this obscure post in order to contrast intelligence work in this backwater with the fast-paced, dangerous work of Harvey and his associates in Berlin, and to establish Hunt in preparation for using him when he got to Watergate. On Mailer’s timeline charts, Hunt had his own column, with entries running from his OSS service in World War II, through Watergate and the suspicious death of his wife Dorothy (also a CIA agent), to Hunt’s 1973 conviction. His plan, we can surmise, was to use Uruguay as a breathing space between the more dramatic events in Berlin in the early 1950s, and Cuba in the early 1960s.
But once Mailer got into the small-bore espionage of Hunt and Hubbard in Uruguay, he had difficulty extricating himself. Part Four of the novel, “Montevideo, 1956–1959,” is the length of a good-sized novel, 266 pages, and while it has some bright spots, they are few. Hubbard could have described his time with Hunt in memoir fashion, but he chose to depict it in the correspondence between Hubbard and Montague’s wife, Kittredge, then living in Washington. Mailer wanted to keep Kittredge before us because Hubbard will marry her 16 years later. And he also wanted to create a major woman character who is an intellectual. Kittredge is a “characterological theoretician,” and the originator of the Alpha-Omega personality theory, an elaboration of his belief that we house two separate personalities. The first difficulty with understanding her theory, she tells Hubbard, is that everyone who has heard of schizophrenia or split personality assumes that Alpha and Omega are equivalent to two satchels in the psyche; one part lives, one part observes and interprets. Not so, she says, we are two people, both are “as complex and wholly elaborated as what we usually think of as a complete personality.” Nevertheless, Alpha and Omega can be characterized: Omega “originates in the ovum and so knows more about mysteries”:
Conception, birth, death, night, the moon, eternity, karma, ghosts, divinities, myths, magic, our primitive past, so on. The other, Alpha, creature of forward-swimming energies of sperm, ambitious, blind to all but its own purpose, tends of course, to be more oriented toward enterprise, technology, grinding the corn, repairing the mill building, building the bridges between money and power, und so weiter.
Each self can borrow properties from the other, and do, because they are wed “like the corporal lobes of the brain.” Marriage is one model for the relationship, she says, another possibility is Czarists and Bolsheviks. Kittredge’s theory mirrors Mailer’s ideas stretching back to “Lipton’s” in the mid-1950s. It tells us more about Mailer, however, than Kittredge, who appears to have been willed into existence to satisfy the perception that he could not create a female character who is both passionate and intellectual. She is perhaps the least convincing major fictional character in his work. At the end of “Montevideo,” not much of consequence has happened, while doubts and dissimulations have piled up.
As one plows through the Uruguay years, an expectation is created that the Alpha-Omega scheme will somehow be integrated into the plot. This does not happen, and the disputed theory’s only real value, as Kittredge puts it, is to suggest “how spies are able to live with the tension of their incredible life-situations.” Mailer flogs the theory, reinforcing the criticism that his worst sin, as Jonathan Franzen has argued, is redundancy. This tendency, along with the unbelievable ways by which Hubbard and Kittredge carry on their plain language correspondence about all kinds of classified operations—by regular mail and by diplomatic pouch—seriously damages the novel.
AS MAILER WAS working on “Montevideo,” he was drawn into the controversy surrounding Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, published in the fall of 1988. On February 14, 1989, the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa, or religious decree, stating that Rushdie’s novel was blasphemous and that he and his publishers should be killed. A Radio Tehran announcer read Khomeini’s words: “I call on all zealous Muslims to execute them quickly, wherever they find them, so that no one will dare to insult the Islamic sanctions. Whoever is killed on this path will be regarded as a martyr, God willing.” The next day an Iranian imam announced a $2.6 million award for any Iranian who carried out the fatwa, and $1 million for anyone else who did it. These amounts were doubled shortly afterward. Some devout Muslims were troubled by sections of the novel that suggested that the Prophet Muhammad had distorted some of the revelations—which comprise the Koran—given to him by Allah, and also by scenes depicting the Prophet’s wives in brothels. There were riots and book burnings all over the Muslim world, including in sections of England with large immigrant Muslim populations. Two of the novel’s translators were stabbed to d
eath, and many died in the rioting. What saddened Rushdie was the fact that the novel (which was short-listed for England’s Booker Prize), was intended “to give voice and fictional flesh to the immigrant culture of which I am myself a member,” yet opposition was fierce among these very people, especially in England. Rushdie, born a Muslim in Mumbai, was offered protection by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and went into hiding.
A week later, the PEN American Center organized a rally of support for Rushdie, who had many friends in the United States. Gay Talese was one of the principal organizers, along with Mailer, Sontag, Doctorow, and Robert Stone. The rally took place in downtown Manhattan at the White Columns building, co-sponsored by the Authors Guild and Article 19, an international anticensorship organization. Joining these writers at the rally were DeLillo, Didion, Edward Said, Robert K. Massie (president of the Authors Guild), Robert Caro, Christopher Hitchens, Diana Trilling, Frances Fitzgerald, and Larry McMurtry, among others. Hitchens was applauded loudly when he borrowed Shelley’s description of King George III to describe Khomeini: an “old, mad, blind, despised and dying king.” The rally took place shortly after many bookstores pulled the novel from their shelves, citing fear of violence. DeLillo recalled that there was an anti-Rushdie demonstration going on outside the building when he and the other writers “took our seats and waited to be called to the rostrum—all except Mailer. He entered at some later point, dramatically, and spoke with Maileresque heat.” He blasted the booksellers and said that Ayatollah Khomeini “wished to show the great length of the whip he can crack, the whip whose secret name is found in our bottomless pit of terrorism.” The fatwa will make writers learn whether they are willing “to die for the idea that serious literature, in a world of dwindling uncertainties and choked-up ecologies, is the absolute we have to defend.” He called on other writers to join him in a vow to open up “all literary meetings with a reading of the critical pages of The Satanic Verses.”
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