IN 1976 IN New York magazine, Mailer sneezed black-magic metaphors all over Watergate and the CIA, Marilyn Monroe and Howard Hughes, Kafka and the Mormons. At once a shaman and an exorcist, he changed shapes and split the lips of his wound: “Is America governed by accident more than we are ready to suppose, or by design? And if by design, is the design secret?”
Trying to understand whether our real history is public or secret, exposed or—at the highest level—underground, is equal to exploring the opposite theaters of our cynicism and our paranoia…. What a crazy country we inhabit. What a harlot. What a brute. She squashes sausage out of the minds of novelists on their hotfooted way to a real good plot.
Harlot’s Ghost is the elephantiasis of that article: a lot of sausage, spicy and nourishing as far as it goes, but not going far enough. On the book’s own calendar, it’s still short twenty years. Mailer will try to talk his way around this gap. His editor, Jason Epstein, has already told the New York Times that Harlot’s Ghost is a “test for reviewers—one that I fear will find many of them wanting.” But this is preemptive condescension. After thirteen hundred pages of often brilliant tease—Popol Vuh and Victorian gothic, Vico and Nietzsche, Italian opera and Mahler symphony, Book of Kells and Book of the Dead—Mailer fails to deliver the ultimate intimacy. TO BE CONTINUED, he tells us, but we’ve waited almost as long for his CIA novel as we waited for his Egyptian novel and it’s like waiting for Zapata or the Red Sox.
Suppose Julien Sorel had joined the CIA instead of the Roman Catholic Church, or C. P. Snow had written Strangers and Brothers about modern-day Templar spooks instead of social-climbing slide rules. The “Company” may be America’s Prep School and Episcopal Church, our Counterreformation and our Fourth Crusade, but it is also Norman Mailer’s spirit world—his Scathach and Xibalda, his Jigoku and Jahannam, his karmavacara and his Universal Baseball Association.
Just kidding. Or am I? “Irrationality,” Mailer says, “is the only great engine of history.” So much for the class struggle. Skip the next several paragraphs if you hate a plot synopsis.
New England blueblood Herrick “Harry” Hubbard joins the CIA in 1955, fresh out of Yale and “as pretty as Montgomery Clift.” He is joining his father “Cal” (a Robert Lowell reference I don’t pretend to fathom) and his godfather “Harlot” (Hugh Tremont Montague, who brightened Harry’s boyhood by teaching him to climb rocks). Harry is posted to Berlin at the time of the Tunnel, where he consorts with pistol-packing William King Harvey; to Montevideo, where he trafficks with the Arbenz-bashing E. Howard Hunt; to Miami, in time for the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis, and Operation Mongoose, where he beds down with playgirl Modene Murphy (an avatar of Judith Campbell Exner), thus communing with Sam Giancana, Frank Sinatra, Jack Kennedy, Fidel Castro, Howard Hughes, and Marilyn Monroe. What happens to Harry after the assassination of JFK is not entirely clear because most of it’s been omitted. A thirteen-hundred-page novel about the CIA leaves out Vietnam, Watergate, Nicaragua, and Iranamok, not to mention running drugs, laundering money, and fingering Mandela. This much, we are vouchsafed:
Between 1964 and 1984, Harry saves the life of Harlot’s wife, Hadley Kittredge Gardiner Montague, who is not only “an absolute beauty,” a Jackie Kennedy look-alike, but also a “genius” who develops her own anti-Freudian theory of personality while working of course for the CIA. After Harlot kills his son and cripples himself climbing more metaphorical rocks, Harry steals Kittredge for himself, while continuing to counterspy for Harlot. In 1984, Kittredge, in turn, is stolen by Dix Butler, an Agency “asset” and bisexual megabucks übermensch, and Harlot’s body, with its face shot off, washes up from Chesapeake Bay. Did Harlot kill himself? Was he murdered? Or has he, in fact, defected to the KGB? Harry leaves Maine for Moscow, to find out. In Moscow, among these many mystifications, he is abandoned by his Creator. And that’s all I’m going to tell you because from now on, instead of reviewing this novel, I intend to haunt it, like the pirate ghost Augustus Farr, like the CIA in America’s kinky closet. (We are spooked!)
What, indeed, did Picasso teach us if not that every form offers up its own scream when it is torn?
—Norman Mailer
We learn about the trouble with Harry from two manuscripts— a shortie called “Omega,” set in Orwell’s 1984, and a gargantua called “Alpha,” maybe the longest flashback in world literature, covering everything else up to 1964. These manuscripts correspond to the two halves of the human psyche as identified by Kittredge for the CIA. They also try out almost every narrative form known to the Mother Russian Novel: picaresque and epistolary; Bildungsroman and roman à clef; the historical, the gothic, the pornographic; the thriller and the western. There are also journal-jottings, cable traffic, interoffice memoranda, and transcripts of wiretaps.
For so many species of story, there are as many tics of prose; seizures and afflatus. When his battery’s charged, Mailer windmills from one paragraph to the next—baroque, anal, Talmudic, olfactory, portentous, loopy, coy, Egyptian; down and dirty in the cancer, the aspirin or the plastic; shooting moons on sheer vapor; blitzed by paranoia and retreating for a screen pass, as if bitten in the pineal gland by a deranged Swinburne, with metaphors so meaning-moistened that they stick to our thumbs, with “intellections” (as he once put it) slapped on “like adhesive plasters.” When he chooses to, he also speaks in tongues. Harlot sounds like Whittaker Chambers. Modene Murphy sounds like Lauren Bacall. Bill Harvey sounds like L. Ron Hubbard or Lyndon LaRouche. The guilt-ridden Uruguayan double agent Chevi Fuentes sounds like Frantz Fanon and Octavio Paz. Harry sounds like Rousseau’s Emile when he isn’t sounding like Wilhelm Reich, and Kittredge sounds like Flaubert’s Salammbo when she isn’t sounding like Hannah Arendt, and together they sound like Nichols and May. And everybody sounds like Mailer, as if picking up quasar signals from Sirius the Dog Star through a plate in the head; as if bodies, vegetables, and objects all had distinctive vibrations, special stinks and personal divinities, angels in the meatloaf, demons in the Tupperware. Even money comes “in all kinds of emotional flavors.” Ghosts! Pirates! Indians! Animism! Alchemy!
You either like this stuff or you don’t, and I do.
Nor are the usual obsessions neglected, like boxing, bulls, and booze. And Marilyn Monroe: Harry’s father, Cal, has a theory that Hoffa bumped her off, hoping to pin the rap on Bobby. And Hemingway: Cal says he beat Papa at arm wrestling one dark and stormy Stork Club night. And LSD: Kittredge seems to have invented it in a lab at Langley. And Martin Buber: I’m convinced Mailer has rendered Harry, for all his Waspishness, “one-eighth” Jewish just so Harlot can tell him to read Tales of the Hasidim. And of course manhood: Like all Mailermen, who are happiest in motion, in boats, and in beds, Harry finds that “happiness is experienced most directly in the intervals between terror,” which may be “our simple purpose on earth.” If we “surmount that terror… we can, perhaps, share some of God’s fear.”
This means a lot of rock climbing, some polo, and an invasion of Cuba. Thinks Harry:
So many of these soldiers had spent their lives getting ready for a great moment—it was as if one lived as a vestal virgin who would be allowed to copulate just once but in a high temple: The act had better be transcendent, or one had chosen the wrong life.
If this Prep School Ethos is hard on Kittredge, tough darts:
I gave up the thought of explaining to her that the natural condition of men’s lives was fear of tests, physical even more than mental tests. Highly developed skills of evasion went into keeping ourselves removed from the center of our cowardice…. So I could not help it—I admired men who were willing to live day by day with bare-wire fear even if it left them naked as drunks, incompetent wild men, accident-prone. I understood the choice.
It’s even harder on Castro, but he’s so Neolithic macho, he will surely understand:
I would mourn Fidel if we succeeded, mourn him in just the way a hunter is saddened by the vanished immanence of the slain beast. Yes, one fired a bullet into beautiful animals in order to feel nearer to God: To the extent that we were criminal, we could approach the cosmos only by stealing a piece of the Creation.
You need no longer wonder: Why Are We in Vietnam? Or Iraq. Or Marilyn Monroe.
I could say, to stretch a point, that we were being schooled in minor arts of sorcery. Are not espionage and magic analagous?
—Harlot
If paranoia is our culture’s weather, all that lightning, then Mailer, bless him, puts up a kite instead of an umbrella. But having grown up on him, we already know that we have enemies. It’s harder to amaze us. It’s a tough break for the old exorcist that Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, and Stan Lee in Dunn’s Conundrum have already covered so much of his territory; that Robin Winks has already written his book about Yale and the CIA; that Tom Mangold has just published a biography of James Jesus Angleton; that Robert Gates twists in the Senate wind; that Pete Brewton’s S&L stories, and the magnitiude of the BCCI scandal, are so much more fantastic to contemplate than the CIA conspiracy in Harlot’s Ghost to finance itself by cashing in on insider tips on when the Federal Reserve Board is about to fiddle with the interest rates. What’s new, Norman?
Well, he really likes these guys. And why not? If you can identify with Gary Gilmore, not to mention Menenhetet, how hard can it be to identify with Allen Dulles? Besides, the old Social Bandit has been soft on WASPs since the moonshot, when he mindmelded with the astronauts. And he’s summered forever in New England with its sermons, charades, and whalingship watergames. Of course: Harry will lose his innocence and Harry is America—that’s the point of these many pages—but what a boys’ club it seems to him at the start, what a Skull and Bones, a safe house, a happy hunting ground of Hopelites, Berserkirs and Samurai, storm-cloud Maruts and Taoist warrior-sages, Gilgamesh, Achilles, Arjuna, Crazy Horse—with secret books, sacred seals, and nifty computer graphics. It’s Rosicrucian, Kabbalistic, Druidical! I mean, they have castles on the Rhône, châteaux in the Loire, temples in Kyoto. Why not great Baals with glowing redhot bellies and Tantric miniatures depicting Kundalini; Nuremberg Maidens with heartsful of nails; ramsing, the horn of Tugs, hanging from a banyan; the altar of sacrifice to Yaldaboath; menhirs, tesseracts, an orgone box, a Swedenborg deathmask, a black Celtic virgin (for Sergius O’Shaughnessy) and, in the reliquary, the foreskin of Hermes Trismegistus? (I’m sorry; it’s catching.)
But what we get instead is Harlot. Harlot seems to be Mailer’s version of James Jesus Angleton, the Fisher King of counterespionage. Like Angleton, he’s suspicious of everybody else at Langley, and was taken in by Kim Philby, and doesn’t really believe in the Sino-Soviet split. As Angleton was referred to variously at the Agency as Mother, Poet, Fisherman, and (aha!) Gray Ghost, so Montague is referred to not only as “Harlot” but also as “Trimsky” (for a Trotskylike salt-and-pepper mustache), and “Gobby” (for “God’s old beast”). Instead of orchids, rocks.
Angleton shows up as a character in dozens of fictions, from Ludlum to Bellow. Even after he was forcibly retired in 1974, he was still obsessed that a Soviet “mole” had penetrated to the nation’s very cerebellum. Everywhere he looked, he saw “doubles.” If he could imagine it, they must be doing it. It’s with Angleton that we associate the phrase “wilderness of mirrors.” He had been, after all, a Futurist poet at Yale, and published a literary magazine, Furioso, full of difficult Modernists like Pound, whose enthusiasm for Mussolini was apparently contagious. T. S. Eliot was a buddy of young Angleton’s; Thomas Mann came to lunch. No wonder that when he looked in the Labyrinth at Langley for the pattern in the magic carpet, all he saw were “doubles” and “moles,” counterfeit identities, masks of the Other. Dostoyevsky, Conrad, Kafka, Nabokov, Wastelands: alienation of the self, by the self, against the self. And no wonder writers love him so much: What else is Modernism but Counterintelligence? Our paranoia is a text.
In Libra, DeLillo imagines an “occult” of intelligence agencies, a “theology of secrets,” the latest in Gnostic heresies, gone to holy war against nihilism, terrorism, inauthenticity, and incoherence. Robin Winks tells us in Cloak & Gown that John Hollander, then on the Yale faculty, was so struck while reading Sir John Masterman’s The Double-Cross System by the code names in the book (Mutt and Jeff, Brutus and Bronx, Zigzag and Tricycle) that he sat down and wrote a book-length poem, Reflections on Espionage, “with spies standing for writers and thinkers, living a kind of hidden life in the actual world,” with Pound and Auden and Lowell in code.
This is weird stuff, made to order for gonzo novelizing. But Mailer shies away from most of it, as he shies away from seeing Latin America or Europe as anything other than geographies of the Agency mind, pale-fire Zemblas. Yes, he has fun with the minor players. If Howard Hunt isn’t quite as flamboyant here as his own alter egos in his own David St. John thrillers, Bill Harvey comes on like Henderson the Rain King. The old shaman has even more fun with code names: In Berlin: BOZO, GIBLETS, SWIVET, and CATHETER. In Montevideo: AV/OCADO, AV/ANTGARDE, AV/OIRDUPOIS, AV/EMARIA. And in Miami, to sort out the bedfellowship of Mafia and Camelot in Operation HEEDLESS, Jack Kennedy is code-named IOTA, Sam Giancana is RAPUNZEL, Murphy/Exner is BLUEBEARD, and Frank Sinatra is STONEHENGE. I love it.
But the old Druid hasn’t given Harlot enough juice to be an Angleton, a paranoid synecdoche. Harlot’s supposed to wow us, as he wows Harry, Dix, and Arnie Rosen in their early Agency days. But when he talks about a Third World still clinging “to pre-Christian realms—awe, paranoia, slavish obedience to the leader, divine punishment,” or explains that the CIA buys up bankers, psychiatrists, narcs, trade unionists, hooligans, and journalists because “our duty is to become the mind of America,” he seems to belong more to a Bill Buckley/Blackford Oakes penny dreadful than a John Le Carré requiem mass. Just once, brooding on relations between Dzerzhinsky, the godfather of the KGB, and the White Russian Yakovlev, does Harlot sound like an Angleton:
When seduction is inspired… by the demands of power, each person will lie to the other. Sometimes, they lie to themselves. These lies often develop structures as aesthetically rich as the finest filigrees of truth. After a time, how could Yakovlev and Dzerzhinsky know when they were dealing with truth or a lie? The relationship had grown too deep. They had had to travel beyond their last clear principles. They could no longer know when they were true to themselves. The self, indeed, was in migration.
But that is the last we hear from Harlot on this subject for another eight hundred pages. And then there’s what I take to be the crucial exchange between Harlot and Bill Harvey, although they are talking to Harry instead of each other, from opposite ends of the novel. First, we get Harlot:
The aim is to develop teleological mind. Mind that dwells above the facts; mind that leads us to larger purposes. Harry, the world is going through exceptional convulsions. The twentieth century is fearfully apocalyptic. Historical constitutions that took centuries to develop are melting into lava. Those 1917 Bolsheviks were the first intimation. Then came the Nazis. God, they were a true exhalation from Hell. The top of the mountain blew off. Now the lava is starting to move…. Lava is entropy. It reduces all systems. Communism is the entropy of Christ, the degeneration of higher spiritual forms into lower ones. To oppose it, we must, therefore, create a fiction—that the Soviets are a mighty military machine who will overpower us unless we are more powerful. The truth is that they will overpower us if the passion to resist them is not regenerated, by will if necessary, every year, every minute.
Later, it’s Harvey, larger-than-life like DeLillo’s David Ferrie, a paranoid’s paranoid:
There is opposition to entropy. The universe may not necessarily wind down. There is something forming that I would call the new embodiment. Entropy and embodiment may be as related as antimatter and matter…. Yes, the forms deteriorate and they all run down to the sea, but other possibilities come together in their wake to seek embodiment. Blobs are always looking to articulate themselves into a higher form of blob. There is a tropism toward form, Hubbard. It counters decomposition.
What does this mean? Jason Epstein has found me wanting. On Mailer’s last page, we are told that Harlot is Harry’s embodiment, but otherwise this sounds remarkably like one of those rough beasts slouching out of a Yeats poem to be born-again, a mystagogic man-god. And Harry has gone to Moscow to sit at Dzerzhinsky’s feet, and this embodiment of Harlot would seem to be whispering that God is the Ultimate Spy, that evolution is just a Cover Story, that the universe is basically Disinformation. Maybe, but the novel itself has no more got us to such a realization than it has bothered to flesh in the migration of Harry from the innocence of Lovett in Barbary Shore to the savage savvy of Rojack, that American Dreamer. And I can’t help identifying with a character in DeLillo’s White Noise, the ex-wife of the professor of Hitler Studies, whose job it is to review books for the CIA, “mainly long serious novels with coded structures.”
Curiously, yet logically, there is one vice… that tempts both narcissist and psychopath. It is treachery.
—Kittredge
I like Modene more than Kittredge, who is Omega to Harry’s Alpha. Besides being a tease, Kittredge is snotty. She hates Lenny Bruce, makes fun of A. J. Ayer, and condescends to Freud. Harry has his doubts about her, too, wondering if she began her affair with him “because she wanted to learn whether she could run an operation under [Harlot’s] nose and get away with it.”
This cross-referencing of sex and espionage is one of the novel’s principal conceits. Harlot tells his boys: “Our studies move into penetralia. We search for the innermost sanctum, ‘the shuddering penetralia of caves.’” The old Orgone Boxer is asking us to think of spies as voyeurs; of the double-backed beast as another double agent; of adultery as a sort of treason; of sex itself as quest and conspiracy, guerrilla warfare and the coup d’état. Our behavior in history has a lot to do with our behavior in bed. Politics is a sex crime. Imperialism is a gang bang.
Sex can also be divine: Coupling with Kittredge, Harry tells us, is a “sacrament,” letting him “see God when the lightning flashed and we jolted our souls into one another.” And sex, of course, is death: Harry smells “the whiff of murder beyond every embrace of love”; Sam and Modene even make it in a graveyard, on top of his dead wife’s mausoleum.
It seems to me that the trouble with sex as the ground of being is that it puts too much of a burden on sex; we all still have to go to work in the morning, even spies. But I’m not ready yet to discuss Mailer and sex. That comes last. What about Alpha and Omega?
Well, according to Kittredge, they aren’t metaphors. They are, in each of us, separate unconsciousnesses, with their own egos and superegos. Alpha is our male component, “creature of the forward-swimming energies of sperm, ambitious, blind to all but its own purposes… more oriented toward enterprise, technology, grinding the corn, repairing the mill, building the bridges between money and power, und so weiter.” Whereas Omega, our female component, “originated in the ovum and so knows more about the mysteries—conception, birth, death, night, the moon, eternity, karma, ghosts, divinities, myths, magic, our primitive past, and so on.”
In other words, double the trouble and goose the guilt, but also someone else to blame it on when things go wrong. What isn’t right-brained/left-brained in this, or gussied-up Carl Jung, or old-fashioned schizophrenia, seems, as so often happens when the vapors take Mailer, to be a kind of Trojan zebra, foisting more of his Manichaean dualisms on the unwary reader—courage and fear, sex and death, Alpha and Omega, Simon and Garfunkel—the way Aristotle once foisted the unconscious dualisms of Greek grammar on an unsuspecting cosmos.
What the hey. If Yeats can believe in faeries, Pound in funny money, Doris Lessing in flying saucers, and Saul Bellow in Rudolf Steiner, the old Rosicrucian has a right to his Alphas and Omegas, however much they remind me of Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden: “The theological ideas which Auden does not adopt but invents are all too often on the level of those brownpaper parcels brought secretly to the War Department in times of national emergency, which turn out to be full of plans to destroy enemy submarines by tracking them down with seals.”
But Mailer as usual is out to get Freud. Freud, says the insufferable Kittredge, “really had no more philosophy than a Stoic. That’s not enough. Stoics make good plumbers. The drains go bad and you’ve got to hold your nose and fix them. End of Freud’s philosophy. If people and civilization don’t fit—which we all know anyway—why, says Freud, make the best of a bad lot.”
This is bumptious. It omits, among many other important matters, Freud’s tragic pessimism. Okay, the guy was saying that civilization depends on a certain amount of repression of the instincts, and Mailer would like to think that he operates entirely on instinct, so he’s bound to resent this bad news, as well as civilization, at least since the Enlightenment. (Mailer belongs, in fact, to Isaiah Berlin’s team of anti-Enlightenment “swimmers against the current” like Vico and Hamann and Herder, like Moses Hess and Georges Sorel.) But you’d think that as much as he identified in Ancient Evenings with Menenhetep on the Boat of Ra, he’d identify even more with a brave pariah who dropped by bathysphere into himself to see why people hurt the way they do; the dream-decoder; the first Deconstructionist. Isn’t this Mailer’s own detective method, a consulting of the suspect self, plowing through magnetic fields, lighting up the wounds of God?
Besides, Harry in Harlot’s Ghost has to kill off two fathers.
I wish the old Kabbalist had spent less time thinking about Hemingway, and no time writing about Marilyn, and some years working through Freud, after which he could take on Marx, thus killing off, instead of kissing off, both his fathers. (Anyway, if Jean-Paul Sartre could churn out eight hundred pages on Freud when John Huston asked him for a screenplay, think what Mailer might have managed, especially with his old buddy Montgomery Clift as Sigmund.) Nor has he really ever answered the shrewd question put to him by an interviewer in Pieces and Pontifications: “Why can’t the unconscious be as error prone as the conscious?”
Just because Kittredge had ghostsex with the pirate-shade of Augustus Farr, who “submitted me to horrors,” doesn’t mean Harry has to heed her every fatuity. He’s better off listening to Chevi Fuentes. Among other good advices, Fuentes warns Harry against the labyrinth-maker Jorge Luis Borges: “Never read him. In five pages, in any of his five pages, he will summarize for you the meaninglessness of the next ten years of your life. Your life, particularly.”
Capitalism, says Fuentes, is essentially psychopathic. It lives for the moment. It can plan far ahead only at the expense of its own vitality, and all larger questions of morality are delegated to patriotism, religion, or psychoanalysis. “That is why I am a capitalist,” he says. “Because I am a psychopath. Because I am greedy. Because I want instant consumer satisfaction. If I have spiritual problems, I either go to my priest and obtain absolution or I pay an analyst to convince me over the years that my greed is my identity and I have rejoined the human race. I may feel bad about my selfishness but I will get over it. Capitalism is a profound solution to the problem of how to maintain a developed society. It recognizes the will-to-power in all of us.”
Chevi used to be a Communist back in Montevideo, before Harry “turned” him. By the time he tells Harry that he’s a capitalist, in Miami, Chevi has also become a homosexual. Listen up:
You will judge me adversely for being a homosexual, yet it is you who is more of one than any of us, although you will never admit it to yourself because you never practice! You are a homosexual the way Americans are barbarians although they do not practice barbarism openly. They keep their newspaper in front of the light. They go to church so as not to face death, and you work for your people so that you will not have to scrutinize yourself in the mirror.
Our Harry? What’s going on? Sure, Kittredge is a drag. Still, isn’t there Modene? But something, at the very least androgynous, seems to have happened to Mailer since he came back from Egypt. If you used to worry about his preoccupation with anal sex, as we all of course have worried about Updike’s preoccupation with oral sex, you are entitled to worry even more.
In Berlin in 1956, after taking him to a seedy S and M bar where the house speciality is “the golden shower,” Dix Butler, Agency übermensch, makes a pass at Harry. Harry declines this invitation, not because he isn’t excited, but because he fears such an act would oblige him “to live forever on this side of sex.” Dix goes both ways, we are told, because he was raped as a child by his brother. But later it’s clear that Arnie Rosen, another of Harry’s schoolmates in Langley’s entering class of 1955, is also gay, and by choice, although forced in the fifties to be furtive.
This isn’t to suggest that the CIA goes in for ritual pederasty—as seems to have been the case among Spartans, Celts, and the Sambia of New Guinea, if you believe Rick Fields in The Code of the Warrior—though it’s not hard to imagine, at the Agency, as in prep school, a homoerotic bonding of the blue-eyed boys, reading their spagyrics and their necromantiums, pulling on their Tomar Towers and their Luxor Obelisks, speaking their Vattan cryptosystems. To join the eighteenth-century Bavarian Illuminati, you underwent a trial by a knife. Their candles were black, their hoods were white, and they bound up your testicles with a poppy-colored cordon: standard Skull and Bones hotstuff. However, I digress.
No. Mailer evokes the fugitive sensibility as yet another metaphor for the secret life: undercover, as it were; the double or fictitious identity. But think for a minute about Chevi. In being “turned,” wasn’t he raped, like Dix? And hasn’t he seen Harry in action on another front, too, smitten by the notorious prostitute Libertad, who turns out to be a hermaphrodite? And, suddenly, one begins to wonder what all these men, like STONEHENGE and RAPUNZEL, are really up to. And I must explain the Tequila Sunrise Paradigm.
In the movie Tequila Sunrise, Mel Gibson and Kurt Russell are high-school buddies who grew up on opposite sides of the law. They compete for Michelle Pfeiffer. If not to them, what’s clear to us is that Gibson and Russell really want to go to bed with each other. Since they can’t, they go to bed with Pfeiffer. She’s the go-between, the trampoline, a universal joint, a portable gopher hole, a surrogate, and a Chinese finger puzzle. Once you have seen it in the movie, you’ll see it everywhere. In Pynchon’s Vineland, for instance, it’s obvious that Vond, the fascistic prosecutor, is murmuring to Zoyd, the rock piano player, through the holes in poor Frenesi’s body. The Tequila Sunrise Paradigm might even explain serial killers like Bateman in American Psycho, unless you believe that when Yuppie Bateman rapes the Aspen waitress with the can of hair spray, nails Bethany’s fingers to the hardwood floor, and sodomizes a severed head, he is really criticizing Late Capitalism and the Fetishism of Commodities. (And I’m the king of Bavaria.)
Now take a look at the relationships in Harlot’s Ghost, not just among Harlot and Harry and Kittredge and Dix, or Dix and Harry and Chevi and Modene, or Modene, Jack, Frank, and Marilyn, but, let’s say, historically. Just suppose that Sam Giancana really wanted to go to bed with Frank Sinatra, and Sinatra wanted to go to bed with Jack Kennedy, and Kennedy wanted to go to bed with everybody, including that “beautiful animal,” Fidel Castro. And Marilyn and Modene (or Judith) were the closest they could get, except, of course, for an invasion. There is no question, even in the pages of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., that the Kennedy Boys had a hard-on for Castro.
Talk about spooky. It shudders the penetralia of caves. Whatever else he’s done or failed to do in Harlot’s Ghost, Mailer—our very own Knight-Errant, Don Quixote, Tripmaster Monkey, Zapata, and Scaramouche—has at last made the personal political. Which leads one to wonder whether, all this time, he really wanted to play ball with Arthur Miller and Joe DiMaggio.