Norman Mailer's Harlot's Ghost

...His thank-you note said "Thanks for hiding me...

...This has produced an unprecedented crisis in the higher echelons of the CIA, for while it is natural to suspect that so zealous a hunter of communist moles was done in by agents of the evil empire, one thing after another leads Harry to suspect that his spiritual father and mentor may all this while have been a KGB agent himself and have arranged his "death" so as to get himself to Russia...

...Yes, America at large in the world after World War II produced a race of glibly Europeanized cold warriors who looked down on local fanatics like J. Edgar Hoover, Congress, and the yet-to-be instructed American people...

...Harry in his SPRING • 1992 • 279 many travels within CIA territory—Washington, Berlin, Montevideo—performs, performs, performs, mostly in bed...

...And then there is the guilt...

...For some time now "history as a novel, the novel 278 • DISSENT as history" have become entwined in Mailer's sense of what is worth reporting and enlarging on in the always tumultuous American scene...

...Mailer says in an author's note that he read almost a hundred books on the CIA, and I believe him, for most of the stuff on training and secret communications obviously comes from his reading...

...His mentor in all things, his true father-figure (his alcoholic and libidinous actual parent, Boardman Kimball [Cal] Hubbard, another CIA big shot, is nowhere as big and splendid as Harlot...

...He takes his secret memoirs of life in the CIA with him, and the rest of the 1,310 pages relate his past adventures in Berlin, Montevideo, Florida on the eve of the Bay of Pigs, where he lived the full rich life with everybody worth writing about (including the mistress President Kennedy shared with Frank Sinatra, the Mafia don Sam Giancana, and others of like importance...

...But what is missing is the political sharpness one expects of a novel by a sort of radical about the CIA, an organization that owes its secret budget and equally secret privileges to the national security state...

...Harlot lost their only son, Christopher, in a rock climbing accident...

...Kittredge's first husband was Hugh Tremont Montague, a.k.a...

...I recognize Mailer's gift of mimicry, but in this instance as in Cal Hubbard's insistence in every restaurant on sitting with his back to the wall, the inspiration is Hemingway (as usual with Mailer) and not the proconsuls living it up who at the same time were determined to give a special cast to the war against the evil empire...

...Mailer is more interested in society than he is in the state...

...All this is in Mailer's book...

...The shift to Harry's experiences in the CIA, although full of sex and adventure and real VIPs by the ton, is just testimony to Mailer's fascination with the power emanating from the highest places—a power that enthralls and dominates him far more than any objections and resentments he may ever have felt about the uses of that power...

...Espionage fiction in the Le Carre era dealt less with the enemy than with the need to uncover "moles" within one's own ranks...

...Harlot is now permanently sentenced to a wheelchair after a bad fall in the same incident, sexually hors de combat...

...In a world of deceit, they know how to keep up appearances...

...Mailer gets so wrapped up trying to cover everything in CIA history, from the tunnel built into East Berlin to tap Soviet communications to the involvement with the Bay of Pigs, to the atmosphere on the eve of the assassination (no actual murder plot is uncovered here), that we follow Harry's progress by his conquests...

...Even when he was simply the novelist—The Naked and the Dead, Barbary Shore, The Deer Park—he was the political novelist, less interested in people than in their representative actions...

...Even as we are enthralled by the atmosphere—the several atmospheres—Mailer builds up in the gothic opening of the book, we can't miss the literary artificiality, the posturing and pretense Mailer brings to the totally unreal Kittredge and everything we learn indirectly about the even more unreal master figure of Hugh Tremont Montague, Harlot...

...For me, at least, it was the constant intrusion of Mailer's own persona—high-living, reckless, belligerent, defiant, always acting up over extraordinary social material that did not need so much parading of self—that for all my awareness of Mailer's exceptional gifts made me think of him as devoted to the passing performance, not whatever it is in our culture that has the slightest chance of lasting...

...All this was vital and believable enough, reflective enough of our mores...

...Harlot, we discover from Arnold Rosen, a CIA agent in charge of a team patrolling the house, supposedly shot himself in the face while sitting in a boat on the Potomac, so destroying his face that no one can positively identify him...

...Information about the relationship had been kept secret by the administration...

...Employees at a university-owned research corporation shredded bales of documents once a panel investigation had begun...

...She adored him, adores him still, although with a certain fear...

...Even if you grant that his Christianity is so intense and apocalyptic that it could account for his (hypothetical) switch to communism as the supposed voice of the wretched of the earth, there is nothing in Harlot's public character that gives any hint of such concern...

...Not now he is...

...Harlot, the leading character whose hypothetical links to the KGB and defection to the Soviets provide the "thriller" function of the book, generally talks like a zany bishop, seeing Christ as the only inspiration and message in our war against godless communism...

...Its possible relevance here, never really developed, is no doubt to the types that go into espionage...

...For reasons not divulged, he once asked to borrow a painter's studio in which I worked by day...

...It was hard to tell the sensationalism he was so fascinated by from the author whose swaggering voice he seemed to be most proud of...

...Harlot, addicted to rock climbing as a test of manly courage, took the young Harry rock climbing to see whether he was a suitable candidate for the CIA...

...He has just been heartily fornicating with his mistress, a waitress named Chloe, who provides plain bountiful satisfactions in bed but cannot possibly make up for his absence from his distinguished wife...

...The book goes downhill after the gothic opening, which displays Mailer's considerable powers of fantasy to such advantage, what with still more splendidly named New England ancestors skulking in the mysterious history of the house (which of course burns down) and Kittredge sounding as loony as the voices Harry hears in the wind on his drive home...

...Harry Hubbard, far from being a patrician Yalie recruited on graduation into the CIA like George Bush (a fact I have from one of his classmates), but slightly out of line, is a dissident figure like Mailer himself...

...The reactionary feistiness within the CIA was encouraged by the rightist bureaucrats, not a few of them ex-radicals, who brought the obedient habits of a lifetime to their Manichaean view of the world...

...Faculty members discovered that they could be subjected to national security reviews without their knowledge...

...In Mailer's history book, hedonism, not political fanaticism like that of James Jesus Angleton, keeps intelligence services on their toes...

...No Bill Casey here with his famously confusing mumble, no Bob Gates with his flat Midwestern voice...

...Harry Hubbard's many adventures in Mailer's sex land are as routine by now as the news that Kennedy was another operator in this land...

...It is really startling to see how stale all this documentation of the cold war era has become...

...And being a leading Mailer character, he is a positive demon in bed...

...But after enough hundreds of pages have been absorbed, you recognize with a sinking heart that you know exactly where the book is going—and that there will be no surprises in it...

...To start with, you can't overlook the portentous inflation of tone with which Mailer summons us to regard people whose blue-blood pedigree is meant to indicate the old-boy network at the CIA...

...The president of the Rochester Institute of Technology has admitted working for the CIA while on leave...

...Which brings me to Mailer's fascination with secrecy, which in this book has less to do with espionage than with adultery...

...Seven and more years ago, when Mailer began this very very big book (which is to be continued), he may have been intensely suspicious of the CIA...

...But what colored Mailer's new journalism, the nonfiction novel and all those other highstrutting exercises in showing ordinary journalists how a real artist could turn the storm of available facts into art and history at once, was his insistence on being all over the place...

...Performance is everything in Mailer's world, sentence by sentence and scene by scene...

...He loses his only son by forcing him to such a test...

...All this CIA stuff becomes as familiar as old newspapers...

...Harlot's Ghost opens on a fog-ridden winter night in Maine, 1983, when the narrator, a CIA operative and Yale graduate named Herrick (Harry) Hubbard, is with fear in his heart driving along perilously icy roads to his mystery-shrouded home on Mount Desert Island...

...Harry arrives at "The Keep" only to find Kittredge's door closed to him and the lady talking to the dead Harlot...

...Kittredge is supposed to be a CIA psychologist of awesome originality...

...This is a familiar feature of Mailer's thinking...

...Mailer has to compete for most of the book with the media and the biography industry, which makes it all the more necessary for him to put a sexual spin on everything...

...Sex in Mailer was always a power relation, and the male always first saw his sexual life as one of domination...

...Although he can't wait to meet up with his wife, Hadley Kittredge Gardiner Montague, a beautiful and inordinately brilliant psychologist for the CIA, it is not just the dark and icy roads that have filled him with fear and trembling this strange evening...

...So Harry must get himself there too, in order to solve the mystery, if there is one...

...He is sadistic in testing possible recruits to the CIA on perilous rock climbs...

...Where, I wonder, are the Soviet specialists and university scholars whose role in the CIA has been so pernicious that Harvard has not allowed classified intelligence research on campus since the 1950s...

...There was never any question in her mind, or in Harry's, that Harlot is the superior figure...

...He is envious of what he supposes—sheer fantasy—to be its social glitter and ease...

...All this was grist to the mill of a rightist professional politician like Casey, the ultimate intriguer whose career, like that of Oliver North, epitomizes our period...

...and the sex is not so much a matter of lust as of random adventure and betrayal...

...And by "society" he means top people, people extraordinary in their quirkiness and freaky opinions, people who are all characteristics that reflect nothing of their actual function in society— this time meaning their professional assistance to the national security state...

...Harlot, a legend in the CIA, the most doggedly anticommunist of its chieftains, who was Harry's godfather in every political sense...

...Kittredge and Harry had a long secret affair, largely by correspondence between the different stations to which Langley assigned them, before she matrimonially exchanged Harlot for Harry...

...Just as "there was ceremony to embracing Kittredge," just as Harlot always appears as a lordly figure "having sanction," so Harry's father, taking his son to lunch at "21," cannot unfold his napkin without saying "I haven't seen a superior hell of a lot of you lately...

...The institute had a secret agreement that gave the CIA influence over curriculum...

...Kittredge, as she is known to her set, is so original in every sense that she frightens Harry rather more than he knows...

...But aside from helping to encourage the experiments with LSD that led to its being secretly planted in the drink of a staff member who responded by jumping out of the window, the chief example of her profundity is her thesis that we are all split types, "Alpha" and "Omega," public and private...

...The only (ex-) CIA agent I have ever known was a professor of English, a specialist in the history of English meter who had operated in Africa...