Harlot's Ghost

...It would have made him Nostradamus...

...The first 103 pages are straightforward...

...Too monumental...

...I'm sure that he still intends to write the Big One...

...Having survived the Beats, the ideologists, the de-constructionists, and the academics, Mailer has checked his Cold War baggage, and we'll be hearing from him again...

...And some of us carried the code to the point of enlisting for the Korean War, in hopes of experiencing first heroism and then disillusion...

...n The American Spectator April 1992 79...

...The beat goes on...

...They were all still with us then, writing and talking—Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, O'Hara, Dos Passos, Farrell...

...In short, the metaphor imploded...

...The ubiquitous figure of our time, "a highly placed administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity," suggests a beldame in britches hanging over the back fences of government whispering, "Don't you dare tell a soul...

...Lance longs for the good old days when reporters were so circumspect that Americans didn't even know FDR was paralyzed, but America operated under a masculine ethos then...

...It's a common practice in the media to repeat someone else's allegations and to claim, when they are bound to be false, that the reporter was only repeating what he or she had picked up from someone else's earlier story...

...The new crop of writers was also respected, for the best of them had also won their spurs in war...

...Mailer has lived with the kind of terror Hubbard frequently describes—you can feel it in his prose and in the very heft of this overweight and sometimes formless novel...

...But Mailer has given us a fat novel with many fine things in it...

...equally, they can see their suicide as an honorable termination of deep-seated terror...

...Lance states vigorously and unequivocally ("It's a damn lie") that he had nothing to do with the BCCI scandal, and anyone who has lived in a girls' dorm tends to believe him...

...Narrator Harry Hubbard, a CIA agent, describes his drive from a meeting with his mistress, a waitress in a diner, to his home on an island off the coast of Maine, where he learns that his mentor, Hugh Trevor Montague (codename Harlot), has washed up in Chesapeake Bay with most of his head blown off by a shotgun blast.(The Hemingway parallels are frequent...

...Along the way we catch glimpses of real characters as Mailer imagines them: Frank Sinatra, Sam Giancana, a Judith Exner stand-in, Allen Dulles, the Kennedys, and—of all people—A...

...Seven years ago, the assumption that the CIA was an institution that could serve as a defining metaphor for our national life would have been less than controversial...

...78 The American Spectator April 1992 dreadful decades, produced little writing of distinction...

...My specific professional assignment becomes my first fear...

...Listen to Harry Hubbard, describing his CIA work: I am used to living with fear, I suffer such occupational stress the way a good businessman worries about cash flow and his breaches of government regulations, his lawsuits, his health, and where he should be buried...

...Ideologists seldom do...

...We waited for their new books and poems and plays much as we wait today for the Super Bowl or the primaries...

...The media's favorite buzzword, "mean-spirited," has a definite hiss to it and cannot be uttered without an accompanying sniff...

...This was Mailer's assumption, and it is a fictional history of the CIA that gives structure to Harlot's Ghost...

...Later, Hubbard describes the book he had been expected to write: Great hopes had been attached to this book...

...1:3 women . . . in those days everyone had his Lady Brett or Catherine (Norman Mailer still does, and somewhere, I suppose, we all do...

...through masses of letters, transcripts, tapes, diaries, memos, and bugged telephone conversations...

...6 6 ep ople kill themselves," says Harry Hubbard at one point, "for the obvious reason: that they are washed up, spiritually down to zero...

...For another, Mailer began writing Harlot's Ghost seven years before the Cold War ended, when Albania was still serene and well before the first fissure appeared in the Berlin Wall—like starting The Naked and the Dead, say, on December 8, 1941...

...For a time it seemed that the Beats would blow away Mailer and the direct descendants of the Hemingway tradition, just as Hemingway and Fitzgerald had blown away an older tradition that survived only in the novels of John P. Marquand, James Gould Cozzens, and a few fine mannerists like Edwin O'Connor...

...We talked about them endlessly in classrooms, dormitories, bars, coffee houses, diners, and barracks...

...It has the ring of truth in light of Clarence Thomas's reference to his "Kafkaesque" troubles, and makes this book, bland as most of it is, a valuable document on the media's increasing propensity for calumny...

...Even if Harlot's Ghost is not the success Mailer would have hoped, it's off his back, and it has allowed him to clear away four decades of increasingly oppressive debris, just as with The Naked and the Dead he cleared away the detritus of the thirties and forties...

...At this point, if we intend to continue Harlot's Ghost, we read it along with Harry, following him from 1955 to 1963: from training to Berlin to Uruguay to Florida...

...To foresee the end of the Cold War seven years ago would have made Mailer more prescient than the faculty at Harvard University or the Sorbonne, the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union, the entire United Nations, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, andespecially—the CIA...

...His fiftieth-birthday lunch at the 21 Club is handled deftly, with a sureness and a feeling for detail—the setting, the mood, the drinks, the conversation—that inform the very best of Hemingway's short stories...

...I live with a prime fear...

...The ideologists themselves, for two HARLOT'S GHOST Norman Mailer Random House/1,334 pages/ $30 reviewed by JOHN R. COYNE, JR...

...Clark Clifford and Robert Altman...

...Many of the techniques here, pioneered by John Dos Passos, one of Mailer's mentors, are highly effective, but the problem is that the world lurched violently after Mailer began this book, and one result of that lurching was that the CIA was revealed as having been composed in large part of bean-counters, climbers, time-servers, and small-minded, bickering refugees from academe...

...He's nearly 70 now, and this book must have cost him dearly in the seven years he wrestled with it...

...I was bogged down in confusions, lack of desire, and too many petty literary jobs...

...Reality overtook its fictionalized shadow, and the truly suspenseful factual correlatives—the Bay of Pigs, the Berlin Wall, the Cuban missile crisis—have either become as arcane as the War of Jenkins Ear or have been pre-empted by Oliver Stone and novelists like Ian McEwan and Don De Lillo...

...What they can do is stamp out anything like literature, which tends to glorify bourgeois values such as individualism, and even suggest that a whole set of recognizable human values exists independent of social, political, and economic forms...

...You'll never guess who Lance's lawyers were during his 1977 troubles...

...His descriptions of people and nature are evocative, as when he shows us the heroine's mother by describing her flower garden...

...All referred to past allegations of banking "irregularities" but none mentioned that he had been cleared of them...

...Over the last twenty years of feminist ascendancy, the surge of women into previously all-male enclaves has set in motion a kind of Gresham's Law of gender in which male values are driven out...

...is author of The Kumquat Statement (Coles) and The Impudent Snobs (Arlington House...

...What you think of this book will depend upon how much kissy-face Christianity you can stand, but despite his aversion to introspection and kneejerk good cheer, I now find that I like ol' Bert better than I used to...

...Now, with the Cold War over and the ideologists confined to universities and federal prisons, we've come full-circle...

...Notes proliferated, yet over a decade and more the actual writing hardly progressed...

...Hysterical retractions and clarifications dominate the news, and the obsession with apologies brushes perilously close to, "If you don't take that back, I'll never speak to you again, as long as I live...

...The Hemingway model was extremely popular: the drinking, the unspoken but deeply felt code, the stoicism, the John R. Coyne, Jr...

...No doubt this could be taken as Mailer's apologia, and apologia perhaps it is...

...The truth, of course, is that the tale bearer carries the same responsibility as the tale maker, or should...

...ry about you and the BCCI as a result of the Time magazine article...

...Eugene O'Neill was alive and writing, as were Frost, Eliot, and Pound...

...Because of the complications surrounding the death, Harry flees to the Bronx (a funny place for anyone to flee to), where he holes up for a year to write his account of what led up to Harlot's apparent murder, then decamps for Moscow, where he rents a hotel room and proceeds to read his 2,000-page microfilmed document...

...Fitzgerald might just as well have been there...

...Kerouac was their Jeb Stuart, and when Kerouac was unhorsed, there was no one available to lead the charge...

...Mailer, James Jones, Irwin Shaw, William Styroneach had written his own Farewell to Arms, and each was bidding for the unofficial title held by Hemingway...

...All his descriptions of men of character are superb—especially Harry's father...

...No, it is worse for me...

...For one thing, post–Cold War America has lost much of the cocky sense of natural national superiority that once was taken for granted—and had been proved beyond any doubt in World War II...

...It was a time when writing and reading fiction was serious business, and what we read directly affected the way we lived our daily lives...

...Well, you know what that means . . . When the BCCI scandal broke in 1991, lime's casually nostalgic and unsubstantiated reference to a "Lance connection" led to the AP's "Banking Scandal Traces Roots to Georgia," which led in turn to an excited call from an Atlanta Constitution reporter: "My editor wants me to do a stoWe didn't know it then, of course, but in the decade or so between the publication of The Naked and the Dead in 1948 and the late fifties we were living through what may have been the last truly literary period of our century...

...The growing feminization of America has turned journalism into a cat fight...

...The job is much more difficult this time...

...But the Beats, it turned out, were light cavalry, no match for the ideologists of the coming decade...

...J. Ayer, explaining logical positivism to Ethel Kennedy...

...Girlish double emphasis flies as reporters demand to know what the President really said and what he really meant...

...Then, of course, there is the heroine herself—Hadley Kittredge Gardiner, out of Hemingway, by way of George Lyman Kittredge's cousin, and perhaps even Ava Gardner too, thrown in just for the hell of it...

...The job, however, was never honestly begun...

...And so is Norman Mailer, attempting once more to give shape and continuity to a period of unprecedented national redefinition...

...Today, half a century later, while it may not be springtime, the possibilities are nevertheless there again...

...She is the quintessence of the Hemingwayesque heroines, Lady Brett all grown up but ageless, and isn't it still pretty to think so...

...In 1948, the world had shed an alien, anti-human ideology, and the possibilities for creating a new world seemed endless...

...S o what's left...

...And none of us should be surprised if he pulls it off...

...Challenging the principle that public figures have not been libeled unless intent can be proved, Lance speaks at last with passionate conviction: Individuals who find themselves attacked by the media, with its growing malice and disregard for the truth, have no redress—unless you'd like to find a lawyer in the yellow pages, hope you can afford his fee, and then try to outspend and outlast Time magazine or "60 Minutes" in a court case...

...Among other things, Mailer's talent, and the courage of a man of letters who still—in an age of cautious writers—dares attempt to sum up a nation, its people, its ideals...