The Ultimate Secret Agent
GOODMAN, WALTER
The Ultimate Secret Agent Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery By Norman Mailer Random House. 791 pp. $30.00. Reviewed by Walter Goodman DO NOT BE ALARMED. Despite the heft of his new book,...
...He didn't yet have his apartment...
...If all this seems trivial, that is the point...
...For all the FBI and KGB knew, he was CIA...
...From the start, he busied himself trying to find a girl...
...If he could not do that by the power of his mind or personality, then he would do it by some remarkable, possibly violent action...
...Mafia conspiracies, and so forth that have kept Kennedy assassination addicts on highs for more than three decades...
...Before shooting and hitting Kennedy, he shot at and missed General Edwin A. Walker...
...This time he launches them from scores of interviews...
...Oswald was a trivial sort of guy...
...She was looking for advice...
...No proof for such a scenario can be offered...
...Mailer, using what he calls a novelis-tic approach to get at Oswald's "kernel of human reality," finds him to be the ultimate secret agent, a loner working for no outside force, a loser afloat on a bloated conception of his place in the world, concocting plots to show all those who had ignored him, or did not value him at his self-assessed worth, the great man he really was...
...As Mailer sees it, his work "depends upon the small revelation of separate points of view...
...Having been fixed up with Tanya, he complained to the fixer upper: "What kind of woman did you give me...
...a library of previous books, especially Marina and Lee by Priscilla Johnson McMillan...
...How unbalanced is confirmed by the second half of the book, which Mailer acknowledges is "replete with speculation...
...It invites skipping, yet for the reader who can still get up some interest in the man who killed Kennedy there is information aplenty...
...It almost makes one feel sorry for Soviet apparatchiks...
...Since our hypothesis is not anchored, however, let us levitate even higher...
...Assisted by Lawrence Schiller, Mailer seems to have interviewed everybody who ever exchanged a word with Oswald—as well as the KGB operatives who kept an eye, or several eyes, on him and produced a steady flow of reports, many of which are given here verbatim...
...The Minsk record is engaging for its quotidian details...
...If Oswald seems dim at the end, it is because he is dim...
...Mailer concludes from the evidence and from his novelist's imagination that Oswald did the deed and did it alone, and that Jack Ruby did his deed and did it alone...
...We have crossed over wholly into speculation...
...The first, fresher part has to do with its hero's stay in the Soviet Union, mainly in Minsk, from 1959to 1961.In addition to capturing enough of Oswald's character to satisfy at least the unobsessed, these 413 pages provide a close-up of what existence was I ike for young, middle-class Russians in the years after Stalin's death but before the death of Stalinism...
...How else but violent...
...Moreover, since the sexual revolution was still some years off, the desires of the young men tended to run up against the resistance of the young women...
...As Mailer writes in the Rus-soprose he uses for much of the first half of his book, "Marina was still not sure she wanted to go...
...The now available records of their surveillance—what drew Mailer to Minsk in the first place—are comical for their tedium...
...It is a long and bumpy trip before you are dropped off at that familiar, comforting destination...
...Was he an agent...
...Well, the author, no stranger to prolixity, makes place in the text for the sort of raw material scholars tend to pack into footnotes at the bottom of the page or in an appendix...
...The mystery he pursues is not so much who killed John F. Kennedy as who was Lee Harvey Oswald...
...A double agent...
...Without it the speculations would seem to be merely the meanderings Mailer has indulged in on so many subjects...
...For Marina, going to America was frightening...
...I tried to kiss her, and she said, 'No kissing...
...I have a baby, and a baby should have its father.' But they would say she was going to a foreign country with a man who was not such a balanced person...
...Such was the situation the 20-year-old Lee found himself in...
...Possessing an apartment of his own for only six rubles a month, courtesy of the authorities ("a Russian's dream," he wrote in his diary), you would think he might have done better than most of his coworkers at the Horizon radio plant where he was planted...
...Most of the women he came in touching distance of seemed to find something strange about him...
...Why so many words...
...At length...
...KGB eavesdropping...
...The second part, relying heavily on the Warren Commission inquiry, is the more familiar...
...Perhaps he dreamed that Communist girls would be more free-thinking than the girls at home...
...Despite the heft of his new book, Norman Mailer isn't out to regurgitate the disputes over grassy knolls, magic bullets...
...No one will ever have to write about him again...
...Only in his mind was he somebody special...
...And by Mailer's account, it was his striving to make reality out of his grandiose and sometimes fevered imaginings that resulted in an American tragedy...
...Here the raw material is the very stuff of the volume...
...The worm brought down the eagle...
...And that, of course, leads to an echt Mailerian proposition: "In the mind-set of the 1950s, a century away from the prevailing concepts of the 1990s, to be weak among men was to perceive oneself as a woman, and that, by the male code of the times, was an intolerable condition for a man...
...And who, in the Cold War, could take a chance...
...Whether you enjoy it depends on how much of Lee Harvey Oswald or of Norman Mailer you can take...
...She would say to [her friends], 'What am I going to do...
...But there was no rush to his bed...
...His courtships were scrutinized by KGB agents...
...Warren Commission hearings...
...Oswald's Tale is told in two parts...
...You didn't have to be a psychiatrist to detect a certain instability, but who could be sure...
...Not that they go un-mentioned in Oswald's Tale—hardly anything goes unmentioned—but they are pretty much brushed aside as Mailer digs into the character of the assassin...
...For example, he detects from scant evidence a possible strain of homosexuality in Oswald, the ex-Marine: "He had to feel feminized by his failures...
...At 17:55 Lee Harvey went down to lobby, went to hairdresser, had his hair cut, and went back to his room...
...First we'll get married, then kiss.'" The romantically inclined and chronically frustrated Oswald wrote of Ella Ger-mann, "a silky black-haired Jewish beauty with fine dark eyes, skin as white as snow, a beautiful smile and good but unpredictable nature," that her only fault was "that at 24 she was still a virgin due entirely to her own desire...
...newspaper clippings...
...Often the speculation sounds more like autobiography than sociology, but that does not make it uninteresting...
...Lee's marriage to Marina (he was determined to marry somebody) seems to have been shaky from the start...
...Alas, he was as dissatisfied with his job in Communist Russia as he had been with his jobs in capitalist America...
...In his not infrequent moody moments, he beat her up, which allows the author to go into a Maileresque aria: "So, for cowards, marriage is an ideal solution, since quarrels are permitted to become ritual: Each mate's psychic excrement can be evacuated with full mutual understanding that the process, like all acts of elimination, is healthful, a veritable zero-sum economy of aggression...
...KGB tapes caught many spats, and interviews with the widow are not flattering to her husband...
...As reported in the book, neither the Russian nor the American spycatchers could get a clear fix on Oswald...
...The picture of life in the Soviet Union is as dreary as advertised: six days of work, with a respite for a few hours of mild partying...
...even passages from Harlot s Ghost, his own CIA novel...
...He seemed to believe he would be greetedby the Soviets with honors and appointed at once to the Politburo, much as he envisioned himself becoming a big player in Castro's Cuba...
...All are duly credited and quoted...
...As for the old questions about the assassination...
...He does not exaggerate...
...Youthful cravings for intimacy were difficult to satisfy without a spare bedroom or car to fool around in, particularly when everyone suspected they were being watched from morning to night...
...That results in some awkwardness: One is jolted by ever changing margins and type faces as narrative gives way to transcripts, reports, reminiscences, and what not...
...Here is a fairly typical excerpt: "At 14:05 Lee Harvey left Horizon factory and walked fast to Pobedy Square, got on coming trolley bus N2, bought ticket and without talking to anybody, went to Volodarksogo, got off trolley bus and was at Hotel Minsk by 14:20...
...Having come to the Communist Motherland out of some sort of ideological conviction or hallucination, Lee was given nothing to do that matched his notion of his significance...
...Mailer shields his speculations in condoms of words: "It is far from wholly improbable, however, to outline a scenario where Oswald I ived for a week with some older man...
...but then he was an American...
...He was a self-identified Marxist who had come close to giving up American citizenship, but he was quickly turned off by the dinginess and tight controls of the Motherland...
Vol. 78 • June 1995 • No. 5
