Harlot's Ghost: A Novel

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something more complicated, Mailer's two specialties -- the fiction of paranoia and polymorphous-perverse fiction -- have themselves a ball. The climax is a visit to a homosexual S & M dive to which Dix takes Harry; after he writes as if privy to the secret thoughts and private conversations of the makers of history, from John F. Kennedy to Fidel Castro, from Allen Dulles to J. Edgar Hoover, from Maj. Gen. Edward G. Lansdale to Howard Hunt, must make that, in a particularly harrowing scene, Dix tries, unsuccessfully but deeply affectingly, to rape or seduce the still virginal young man. One has become used to this stolid, complacent return serve: so apparently grounded in reason and scepticism but so often naive and one-dimensional. In one way, the so-called ‘conspiracy theory’ need be no more than the mind’s needful search for an explanation, or for an alternative to credulity. If one exempts things like anti-semitism or fear of Freemasons, which belong more properly to the world of post-Salem paranoia and have been ably dealt with by Professor Richard Hofstadter in his study The Paranoid Style in American Politics, then modern American conspiracy theory begins with the Warren Commission. There had been toxic political speculation at high level before, as when certain people thought that there was something too convenient about the Lusitania for President Woodrow Wilson, and too easy about Pearl Harbour for President Franklin Roosevelt – both of these, incidentally, hypotheses which later Churchill historians are finding harder to dismiss – but such arguments had been subsumed in the long withdrawing roar of American isolationism. The events in Dealey Plaza and the Dallas Police Department in November 1963 were at once impressed on every American. And the Warren Commission of Inquiry came up with an explanation which, it is pretty safe to say, nobody really believes. Conspiracy theory thus becomes an ailment of democracy. It is the white noise which moves in to fill the vacuity of the official version. To blame the theorists is therefore to look at only half the story, and sometimes even less.

above the tip that suggested a good deal of purpose in his trigger finger." One would have to be a graduate of the C.I.A. to figure out that connection. In any case, Harry thrives at the cold war game, Western hemisphere style. Rochant, who alsois developing a global spy thriller with Snowpiercer producer Tomorrow Studios, will write, direct, exec produce and showrun the project. The C.I.A. does go in for musical analogies. Thus Allen Dulles, from the audience, interrupts Hugh's lecture with an operatic trope for Communist fallibility: "When we have to listen to an awfully vain tenor who can never hit his high note, else would commit to print such writing as "Miami, soft as a powderpuff, murderous as a scorpion, lay suspended like Nirvana"? Or, featuring that favorite among his many archaisms, inversion: "Sex on marijuana was bizarre.This not always successful supersession of the powerful but slightly corrupt father figure has been a paradigm of Mailer's fiction since the start: Lieutenant Hearn and General Cummings in "The Naked and the Dead"; Sergius O'Shaughnessy with Hugh an orgy farm that Dix runs near Washington, and sleeps repeatedly with that ruthless fellow, who, as a C.I.A. man, would torture the spies who worked for him: urinate on them when tied up in an S & M joint, force their Part Two takes us to Berlin, where Harry becomes Harvey's assistant, beneficiary of his confidences as well as of his rages, during which this walking arsenal with weapons secreted all over his anatomy imperils anyone near him. Harvey's pride This Uruguayan section, encompassing the years 1956 to 1959, affords Mailer a chance to display his knowledge of the uneasy interaction between American diplomatic personnel and the C.I.A. guys for whom they must provide cover, even as other sections

The novel — Mailer’s longest — blends reality and fiction and features figures including Richard Nixon, Fidel Castro, Sam Giancana, Bill Harvey and Howard E. Hunt. Arnie Rosen, a colleague of Harry's from the C.I.A., has arrived with three men to watch the Keep. They are waiting for Dix Butler, an ex-colleague and perfect blond brute, vicious and irresistible. He has become deviously super-rich after leaving The FBI and the CIA do employ undercover men of terrible character?’ And Allen Dulles, in all the bonhomie of a good fellow who can summon up the services of a multitude of street ruffians, replied, ‘Yes, terribly bad characters.’ It’s some help to be English, and brought up on Buchan and Sapper, in appreciating the dread kinship between toffs and crime.at the C.I.A., he puts in time working in the Agency files, where, under a cryptonym, he falls afoul of William King Harvey, the historic Berlin station chief and the first nonfiction figure that Mailer brings to deeply disquieting Oliver North, with his puffed-out chest and his lachrymose style, his awful martial ardour and his no less awful sentimentality, is the perfect example of a Mailer figure – a superstitious fascist, whose whole entourage was full of self-hating, uniform-loving homosexuals. North’s strong will to obey and his sadomasochism, his sense of betrayal over Vietnam, and his need for revenge in Nicaragua, brought us as close to an American Roehm as was comfortable. It is still uncomfortable to reflect that he was not thwarted by law or by civilian authority. Mailer's C.I.A., it must be noted, is very strong in the humanities. The talk here is full of erudite references to Alexander Calder, Henry Miller, Henry James, Hemingway, Melville, Kant, Lautreamont, Joyce, Kierkegaard, the Oxford English Dictionary,

Those who complain of the banality of American political life seem at first review to have every sort of justification. Political parties are vestigial; the ideological temperature is kept as nearly as is bearable to ‘room’; there is no Parliamentary dialectic in Congressional ‘debates’; elections are a drawn-out catchpenny charade invariably won, as Gore Vidal points out, by the abstainers; the political idiom is a consensual form (‘healing process’, ‘bipartisan’, ‘dialogue’) of langue de bois and the pundits are of a greyness and mediocrity better passed over than described. Periodic inquests are convened, usually by means of the stupid aggregate of the opinion poll, to express concern about apathy and depoliticisation, but it’s more consoling to assume that people’s immense indifference is itself a wholesome symptom of disdain. Good as Mailer is at evoking straightforward action -- a clandestine nocturnal operation by sea and land against Cuba is a gem any novelist could be proud of -- he promptly lets his obsessions spoil his game. Through almost all his fictions, Mailer pursues, The three central characters, all inventions, interact intimately with major and minor historical figures in a device hallowed by much illustrious fiction, but especially in vogue since E. L. Doctorow's "Ragtime," in whose movie version, If ever a man feels the sweetness, the utility of friendship, must it not be that moral leper called by the crowd a spy, by the common people a nark, by the administration an agent?Louis XVIII died, in possession of secrets which will remain secret from the best-informed historians. The struggle between the General Police of the Kingdom and the Counter-Police of the King gave rise to dreadful affairs whose secret was hushed on more than one scaffold. mite of credibility. The chaste Kittredge, who has known no other man besides Hugh and Harry (unless we count the ghost of Augustus Farr, who "submitted [ sic ] me to horrors"), and who is now happily married to Harry, visits manicly or maniacally, power and sex, i.e., achieving supremacy in some profession such as politics or the military, and possessing the most beautiful women in the world. A Stendhal could make some magisterial fiction even out of this, id). It becomes particularly obstreperous and tiresome in "Harlot's Ghost," where Kittredge keeps evolving -- for the C.I.A., no less, but also for her own and Harry's delectation -- a theory of two principles in Unforgiving, Kittredge marries Harry, who once saved her from suicide. Lovemaking with Kittredge is "fabulous," what with Harry introducing her to the joys of French sex, whereas Hugh never went beyond Italian. But though copulation with Kittredge

epistolary novel, diary novel, phone-call novel, gossip-column novel, philosophico-political novel, pornographic novel and adventure story rotate into our field of vision. He comes closest to another highly gifted, overexuberant Always look to the language. We’ve built a foundation for ourselves almost as good as a directive. “Subvert military leaders to the point where they will be ready to overthrow Castro”. Well, son, tell me. How do you do that by half?... Always look to the language.’ where he expects to find Harlot a revered defector, pampered by the K.G.B. Ensconced in Moscow's Hotel Metropole, Harry rereads "The Game" on microfilm; this account constitutes the bulk of "Harlot's Ghost." the Agency, and is apparently on his way to the Keep. More strange things happen. The Keep burns down with Arnie in it. Kittredge disappears with the bestial Dix, with whom she has fallen helplessly in love. Yet this gruff, stupid masculine world is set on its ears by one courtesan. ‘Modene Murphy’, who is Mailer’s greatest failure of characterisation here, is perhaps such a failure because she has to do so much duty. In the novel as in life, she has to supply the carnal link between JFK, Frank Sinatra and the mob leader Sam Giancana. (Ben Bradlee, JFK’s hagiographer and confidant, says that one of the worst moments of his life came when he saw the diaries of Judith Campbell Exner and found that she did indeed, as she had claimed, have the private telephone codes of the JFK White House, which changed every weekend.)by various undercover means. Here Mailer really comes into his own and vividly evokes the internecine intrigues among the C.I.A., the F.B.I., the Pentagon and the State and Justice Departments. Hugh, Harry, Kittredge, Hunt, Butler The Reds, not us, are the evil ones, and so they are clever enough to imply that they are in the true tradition of Christ. . . . The Russians know how to merchandise one crucial commodity: Ideology. Our spiritual offering is But there are aspects of Mailer's fiction that are less endearing. I am not even thinking of such minor absurdities as the fixation on bodily effluvia and odors (thus the Nazi maid in "An American Dream," whom the hero possesses anally, Harry's education in Uruguay ends, and he is transferred to Miami for Parts Five and Six, dealing respectively with the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile crisis, leading up to Operation Mongoose, the attempt, between 1961 and 1963, to eliminate Castro as his eagerness to show off his learning and verbiage. The learning is sketchier than he realizes, the verbiage riddled with grammatical and lexical errors, but the pontification proceeds undaunted: "Our discipline is exercised