by Martin Amis
Mailer’s chief addendum to the Hemingway tradition he loyally follows is the element of paranoia. The Hemingway hero saw what dangers faced him and recognized them for what they were. The Mailer hero is fuzzier on the whole question of threat, less sure of its provenance. Is it real? Is it self-projected? (The spectre of latent homosexuality is directly faced in Tough Guys, perhaps giving weight to the notion of unconscious self-parody.) But paranoia excites Mailer and makes him write well:
… he had the ability of many a big powerful man to stow whole packets of unrest in various parts of his body. He could sit unmoving like a big beast in a chair, but if he had a tail, it would have been whipping the rungs.
Mailer’s presence on the page has something of this quality – compelling, uncomfortable, on bad terms with its own sexuality. The presence fills you with disquiet; but then you have to find the nerve to get up and leave the room.
Observer October 1984
Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery by Norman Mailer
On page 1,288 of Harlot’s Ghost, Norman Mailer’s prodigious – and prodigiously underrated – novel about the CIA, the author takes us up to the seventh floor of Agency HQ on the afternoon of 22 November 1963. The grandmasters of national security, the men who had sought to become ‘the mind of America’, are gathering in the director’s meeting room. ‘And we sat there,’ one of these mandarins recalls, on page 1,288, after 600,000 words of exponential intrigue, of second-guessing, double-lifing, triple-dealing:
And we sat there … It’s the only time in all these years I saw so many brilliant, ambitious, resourceful men – just sitting there. Finally [Agent] McCone said, ‘Who is this Oswald?’ And there was a World Series silence. The sort you hear when the visiting team has scored eight runs in the first inning.
Oswald’s Tale attempts to fill that silence. Many million man-hours have been spent ‘following the bullet trajectories backwards’ from the President’s bespattered limousine ‘to the lives that occupy the shadows’, as Don DeLillo put it in Libra (1988), his dauntingly brilliant novel about Oswald. But the facts of the assassination will always be partly subsumed by Mailer’s subtitle. What have we got? The where and the when are totemically established. We have the who, if not the how or the who with. We have means and opportunity; we lack motive. Oswald’s Tale is nonfiction, but Mailer can rely on the novelist’s forensic talents: he knows that the who, properly considered, will give us the why. And then, perhaps, meaning will be glimpsed in this wilderness of mirrors.
During the winter of 1959, Lee Harvey Oswald went and did something interesting. After a lonely and fatherless childhood, a morosely politicized adolescence, and a stint in the Marines (where his nicknames were Mrs Oswald, Oswaldskovich and ‘Shit-bird’), Oswald defected to the USSR. As he probably saw it, the Soviet Union stood up for the little guy – and Oswald was certainly little. It worked out, too, in a way. Fortuitously, ominously and instantly, he elevated himself from mediocrity to exotic. He was ‘a real American, and unmarried’, one of his minders observed: ‘Young women even came to the hotel and said, “How do we meet this guy?” ’ Being American had never cut so much ice in New Orleans or the Bronx.
The authorities – the ‘Organs’ – soon got him out of Moscow and parked him in Minsk, a city he had never heard of. They gave him a flat and a job and light surveillance: Oswald would have been mortified to learn that his KGB handler regarded him as ‘primitive – a basic case’, of ‘zero’ political value. And yet he blundered along, dependably feisty, incurious and obtuse. One morning at seven, he was roused by election workers (it was the day of some obligatory vote) ‘and Lee wouldn’t open up. He kept yelling, “This is a free country.” ’ He fell for a girl called Ella, and was spurned. He married a girl called Marina (‘to hurt Ella’, according to his diary), and soon settled into a husbandly regime of bickering, fist-flexing, and premature ejaculation. He liked the Russian summers but he didn’t like the Russian winters. Ever since Ella he had been trying to wheedle his way back to America (he did have the knack of outwitting, or outlasting, titanic bureaucracies). With his wife and daughter he sailed for New York in the summer of 1962, and then made for Texas. He flunked a series of cheesy jobs. He bought a cockroach spraygun. He acquired a rifle. He had a year to go.
Of course, the literature on Oswald, official and freelance, is by now biblically vast. DeLillo imagines the Warren Report as ‘the megaton novel Joyce would have written if he’d moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred’; and Warren, like Joyce, has spawned an industry. Mailer was emboldened to add his book to the stack when he was offered ‘an Oklahoma land-grab’ of fresh material: the KGB dossier on Oswald, and the chance to interview his comrades and controllers in Moscow and Minsk. Whereas the American Oswaldiana is porous and bloated from constant exposure, the Russian material has been hermetically sealed. It is thirty-five years old, but it is pristine. In these cogent and artistic pages Oswald is no longer the spectral, hangdog examinee of various hearings and post-mortems. He comes alive. And he looks horribly familiar. From a KGB transcript of a bugging (‘for Object LHO-2983’):
LHO: Shut up. Take your baby (baby is crying) …
WIFE: (sobbing) Don’t look at me that way – nobody is afraid of you. Go to hell, you bastard!
LHO: You’re very good.
WIFE: You can go to your America without me, and I hope you die on the way.
Oswald did indeed go back to his America. And at Dealey Plaza he duly ruptured its history in 6.9 seconds.
What we seem to be contemplating, then, is a tale of egregious disproportion. Simply put, the most potent and promise-crammed figure on earth had his brains blown out by a malevolent Charlie Chaplin with a wonky rifle and a couple of Big Ideas. Now, everything in Mailer rebels against this reading. If Oswald was a nonentity, acting alone, all we are left with is absurdity – more garbage, more randomness and rot. Clearly, there are only two ways out of the bind. Either Oswald wasn’t acting alone – or he wasn’t a nonentity. He was complex, tortured; he was tinged by the ‘tragic’.
To our initial surprises, Mailer rejects conspiracy. According to Oliver Stone’s feverish movie, JFK, the assassination involved practically 50 per cent of the American populace. The unlikelihood of a pan-national cover-up would seem to outweigh the more local lacunae – Oswald’s marksmanship, the ‘magic bullet’, Jack Ruby – which are merely ‘evidentiary’, and subject to the ping-pong of rival advocacies. More crucially, all conspiracies founder on the crags of Oswald’s character, as here established. No concerted effort, however harebrained, could have placed Oswald at its leading edge. Even as a patsy he was unemployable.
This clincher appears to preclude any attempt to upgrade Oswald from the ranks of lumpen inadequacy and delusion. But Mailer persists, cautiously, candidly (nothing is fudged), until he can descry a ‘young intellectual’, however stunted, with a ‘vision’, however warped. Thus Mailer takes the admitted ‘liberty’ of cosmeticizing Oswald’s dyslexia. He had a genuine handicap, after all, and wasn’t just another tub-thumping illiterate. To show him ‘at his best’, quotations from Oswald’s writings ‘have been corrected here for spelling and punctuation’. Well, Oswald’s prose was pure alphabet soup: he could spell Ukrainian ‘Urakranion’ and ‘Urakrinuien’ in the same sub-clause. To regularize his spelling seems merely humane; but to regularize his punctuation (in an age when the semi-colon, say, is a profound public mystery) catapults him into the cultural elite. Besides, inarticulacy is the key to Oswald’s thwartedness. He was a wife-beater; and what else is a wife-beater but a man who runs out of words – who keeps coming up empty on the words? In his essay on life in Minsk, Oswald included a section called ‘About the Author’. The death of his father, he wrote, ‘left a far mean streak of indepence brought on by negleck’. Here is Oswald captured in a poem one word long: Negleck …
Mailer has written some pretty crazy books in his time, but this isn’t one of them. Like its predecessor, Harlot’s Ghost, it is t
he performance of an author relishing the force and reach of his own acuity. Recalling his championship of the unreformed convict Jack Henry Abbott, we see that he still has the old weakness for any killer who has puzzled his way through a few pages of Marx. But Mailer does have real feeling for frustrated and effaced existences. And his portrait here of Khrushchev’s Russia reproduces the fluid empathy of his other non-fiction monument, The Executioner’s Song. In late-period Mailer, deep resources are being marshalled. With DeLillo’s Libra, Oswald’s Tale presides over the Dallas mausoleum. Mailer provides the broad architecture, DeLillo the gloating gargoyles. In a sense, the two books constitute Oswald’s most coherent achievements and the only valuables in his legacy.
To return to the subtitle: An American Mystery. Mailer remarks that he might have opted for An American Tragedy if Theodore Dreiser hadn’t pre-empted him. As it turns out, Mailer comes close to solving the mystery, but he never establishes the tragedy. Dreiser’s tale was tragic and American because it happened every day. Oswald made only one notch on the calendar. It was meaningless; he just renamed an airport, violently. His tale was American in its inclusiveness: he connects Hugh Auchincloss, the Washington socialite, with Brenda Jean Sensibaugh, the stripper employed by Jack Ruby who was found hanging by her toreador pants in an Oklahoma jail in 1965.
Oswald’s life was not a cry of pain so much as a squawk for attention. He achieved geopolitical significance by the shortest possible route. He was not an example of post-modern absurdity but one of its messiahs: an inspiration to the glazed loner. He killed Kennedy not to impress Jodie Foster. He killed Kennedy to impress Clio – the muse of history.
Although he never makes it into tragedy, Oswald deserved the tragic attendants of irony and pathos. This is Oswald’s mother, the devouring Marguerite (and by now we have seen Oswald crying many, many times), as she describes her son’s corpse:
Marina went first. She opened his eyelids … This is a very, very strong girl, that she can open a dead man’s eyelids, and she says, ‘He cry. He eye wet.’ To the doctor. And the doctor says, ‘Yes.’
It was a hectic struggle to find a minister and a grave. They buried him under his last and least-dignified pseudonym, William Bobo. His eye was wet. He was twenty-four.
Sunday Times September 1995
* Ancient Evenings (see below).
Vidal’s Mirror
Palimpsest by Gore Vidal
Gore Vidal’s Palimpsest is a tale of the unexpected. Contemplating its arty, finicky title (pronounced ‘Pelimpsest’, perhaps, with full Sitwellian delicacy), its handsomely ‘integrated’ photographs (grand houses, Caligulan profiles), its bulk, its celebrity-infested index, one gears oneself for predictable pleasures. Namely, the invigoratingly high-plumed cynicism of Vidal’s discursive prose, plus plenty of gossip.
I thought I was wise to all his moves. I knew Vidal would have me frowning and nodding and smiling and smirking – with admiration, and exasperation, and scandalized dissent. I never dreamed Vidal would have me piping my eyes, and staring wanly out of the window, and emitting strange sighs (many of them frail and elderly in timbre). Approaching seventy, Vidal now takes cognisance of the human heart, and reveals that he has one. Palimpsest is a tremendous read from start to finish. It is also a proud and serious and truthful book.
First, though, the familiar diversions, and the familiar humour which, frequently and typically, tends towardsthe unintentional. How can this be? Is it that Vidal, like Lear, has ever but slenderly known himself? Or is it that he just wants it both ways – all ways? The latter, I believe. Vidal is determined to be a) in the thick of things, and b) above the fray. He knows everybody and doesn’t want to know anybody. He has had lovers by the thousand while doing ‘nothing – deliberately, at least – to please the other’. Publicly despairing of the American political system, he runs for Congress (and, later in the life than this book takes us, for president). The ambivalence follows Vidal through all spheres and orbits, and involves him in many decorative contradictions.
Gossip, particularly sexual gossip, is viewed as the sworn enemy of truth; and truthfulness, for Vidal, remains the prince of the natural virtues. Yet gossip-fans will find much to gossip about in Palimpsest. On page seven, Jackie Kennedy is already hoiking up her gown to show Vidal’s half-sister Nini ‘how to douche post-sex’. Elsewhere, we are told that Marlon Brando had ‘two abortionists on retainer’. ‘Look at that ass,’ says Tennessee Williams ‘thoughtfully’, as he follows Jack Kennedy through a doorway. Then there are Nureyev’s dreamy insinuations about Bobby. Promiscuity was ‘perfectly normal … in the high-powered world’, as Jackie knew. Gore himself got about a bit: ‘Jack raised his head from the pillow to look at me over his left shoulder.’ But relax. This isn’t Jack Kennedy. It’s only Jack Kerouac.
Towards the end of the book, Vidal confides that he dislikes social gatherings. Still, this hater of parties clearly went to several thousand of them, perhaps just to make sure. Vidal never had to go looking for all these parties, unlike Truman Capote, say, whom Vidal keeps running into at all these parties, along with Williams, Kerouac, Isherwood, et al. (‘Avoid writers,’ Vidal cautions us, more than once.) ‘Celebrities are invariably celebrity-mad,’ he wearily notes, having charted another ‘season’ spent among the white trash (up to and including the Duke of Windsor and Princess Margaret). Vidal isn’t namedropping. Who else is there? A galaxy of luminaries has always clustered itself around this literary quasar and his huge gravitational pull. The bloke in the next office is Federico Fellini (‘Fred, as I called him’). The current flatmates are Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. In these pages, ordinary people are the true exotics – such as Howard Austen, who has written no operas, ruled no countries, and inherited no fortunes, and with whom Vidal has chastely dwelt for more than forty years.
These days, Vidal is resignedly aware that he has somehow gained a reputation for physical vanity. It seems inexplicable, because he never boasts about his looks. He may remark on the ‘astonishingly handsome’ figure cut by his father, and may mention the ‘flaring Gore nostrils’ that he has inherited, as has the current Vice President (a dim cousin). But that’s all he’ll say on the matter. Others can say what they like, and Vidal is of course free to adduce their testimonies, in print. Harold Acton found him ‘aggressively handsome’. Cecilia Sternberg thought his face ‘curiously of the antique world, like a Greek mask’. ‘Just the sight of Gore’, wrote Elaine Dundy, ‘had the effect of instantly cleansing my palate – like some tart lemon sorbet’ (‘He is handsome, yet’). Having seen ‘the picture of him that adorns his latest opus’, William Burroughs urgently wanted to know: ‘Is Gore Vidal queer or not?’
To which the answer is a strangely qualified yes. Vidal is queer, sort of but in Vidal’s world so is everybody else. There’s Capote, Williams, Isherwood, Kerouac, Baldwin, E.M. Forster, and so on. But even the fanatical skirt-chasers – Marlon, Jack, Bobby – betray certain leanings. Greta Garbo had ‘an eye for girls’; in Hollywood, so did ‘just about every star or star’s wife’. Ken Tynan, too, was ‘one of nature’s innate and unalterable lesbians’. During the war, in Vidal’s all-gay army, ‘most of the boys’ embraced the chance ‘to do what they were designed to do with each other’. Earlier, in Vidal’s all-gay school, boys ‘thought that kissing had been invented by girls … it was not always pleasant for us when the increased estrogen flow made their salivas taste unpleasant.’ No, unpleasant things are not always pleasant. But I have never before heard a word of complaint about that oestrogen flow, or indeed any mention of it. Maybe the boys I know are differently ‘designed’. As elsewhere in his writing, Vidal gives the impression of believing that the entire heterosexual edifice – registry offices, Romeo and Juliet, the disposable diaper – is just a sorry story of self-hypnosis and mass hysteria: a hoax, a racket, or sheer propaganda.
Sexually – and here we approach the heart and truth of the book – Vidal is a fabulous beast. A unicorn, perhaps, or a satyr with a strict s
et of rules. ‘I never go to bed with friends,’ he writes. A hyperactive cruiser, Vidal has never had a love affair. Indeed, ‘since I don’t really know what other people mean by love, I avoid the word’. But he knows what he means by it; and in the end the word can’t be avoided. For once and once only he ‘moved far beyond sex or eroticism and on to the wilder shores of love, and shipwreck’.
In general, novelists are intimately repelled by the business of psychoanalysis. Nabokov could probably have written an extra book or two in the time he sat around loathing Freud. The self – that holding operation between the mind’s various factions – is what novelists feel they are obliged to grope their way around: they don’t want to see the A to Z. Vidal is, of course, painfully reluctant to view himself as a clear-cut case. But he has the courage to let the pattern emerge, in all its embarrassing symmetry.
Two relationships appear to have decided everything, and they are established early on in the life, and in these pages, with passionate force. ‘Never have children, only grandchildren,’ Vidal was told by his grandfather, T.P. Gore. Having lost his sight in two different accidents, one for each eye, and then gone on to become the first senator from the state of Oklahoma, T.P. was an inspirational figure for the whole nation. In his grandson (and sometime ward), Senator Gore found a vital resource: little Gore would read to him, eagerly, for hour after hour – an indefatigable falsetto. After such a childhood, after such an example, Vidal was destined for stoicism. Any weakness can be worked into a strength, he writes, in the book’s steeliest phrase, by ‘those who mean to prevail’.
The second formative figure is the vanished young man called Jimmie Trimble. Vidal’s first and only love is insistently summoned in terms of a lost duality: ‘What I was not, he was, and the other way around’; ‘Jimmie, of course, was something else – me’; ‘He was the other half of me that never lived to grow up.’ Jimmie was killed on Iwo Jima in 1945. He never grew up, and never grew old, and never relinquished his pristine burnish. Palimpsest thus shyly invites us to see Vidal as a version of Narcissus, in the classical mould, struggling with illusion, with despair, with death. It is a lot to ask – but this reader assented willingly enough. When he died, Narcissus was transformed into the flower that bears his name. Vidal wanted a different fate: he wanted to survive and prevail.