NORMAN MAILER’S HARLOT’S GHOST REVISITED

ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0345379659  ‎ Random House Trade Paperbacks     £18.99

reviewed by Tony Roberts

In the course of a long reading life we discover, enthuse over, remember and revisit so many books. Some we stumble on a considerable time after their publication. Such for me is Harlot’s Ghost (1991), which I read earlier this year, a novel written deep in John le Carré’s time and way before David McCloskey, former CIA analyst, took to the bestselling shadows. It is a work by Norman Mailer (1923-2007), once America’s bad boy of fiction,  a CIA novel which explores, expands and enhances the genre. It is a gargantuan treat, ‘unforgettable’ according to Martin Amis. It is his statement on postwar America, the CIA seen —as someone put it —as ‘the mind’ of the country. And it is, in my view, his masterpiece.

Mailer was once described in The New Yorker  as ‘A writer of the greatest and most reckless talent.’ I have known his work since the late sixties. I admired The Naked and the Dead (1948) and the account of the ‘March on the Pentagon’ that was The Armies of the Night (1968). Yet his famed arrogance, the pugilistic stance, the priapic swagger, the aggressiveness made me uneasy. Such hype! My negativity was to a great extent muted this year, when I read at last the excellent Norman Mailer: A Double Life by J. Michael Lennon (2013). What came across was the sheer energy, the passion and the frequent brilliance of his contribution to American fiction (and cultural chaos). And the reason I had turned to the biography was that I had picked up Harlot’s Ghost (1991), intrigued by the idea that someone could sustain a work of that length (1374 pages in my edition) in that genre. His ambition won me over at last. I want, then, to recommend this novel (and perhaps the high-octane life story as well).

After WW11, the wartime hub of American intelligence operations, the Office of Strategic Services, reformed as the Central Intelligence Agency. Its brief involved all manner of covert activities abroad without requiring Congressional approval. At the top of its list were anti-Communist activities and the organisation of coups (notably in Iran, Guatemala and Cuba in the early nineteen fifties). Almost forty years on Mailer took the business of the CIA as an expression of his conflicted postwar nation. In an ‘Author’s Note’ at the end of the novel he acknowledged, ‘It is a fictional CIA and its only real existence is in my mind, but I would point out that the same is true for men and women who have spent forty years working within the Agency.’ Also, as he pointed out with some justification, a good novel could ‘derive from one’s cultural experience’ as well.

In Harlot’s Ghost, Harry Hubbard is first a young agent who joins the CIA in 1955, the son of a WW11 legendary veteran of the OSS/CIA agent, Cal Hubbard. He is also the mentee of his godfather, another senior CIA authority, Hugh Tremont Montague, the mercurial ‘Harlot’ (Mailer’s pun is intentional), who drives the novel, engineering his career in the CIA. Harlot’s wife, Kitteridge, whom Harry is obsessed with and who is herself a member of the CIA, later becomes Harry’s wife, after domestic tragedies. Kitteridge is brilliant and attractive (but not ultimately convincing, according to most critics). Her role is to, Mailer-like, expound the theme that there are two people who live inside each person (alpha and omega) who do not share the space convivially. This inevitably creates tension, but it also licenses duality of talents and purposes, useful for a spy and for a libertine. One can concurrently have two masters and two lovers.

While Harry and Kitteridge communicate exhaustively by letters for much of the novel —being surprisingly indiscreet about his activities in the process — Harry is later entangled with another woman, Modene Murphy, an air stewardess who has intimate relationships with both Jack Kennedy and an old mafia boss, Sam Giancana. Other real life figures we meet in the novel include E. Howard Hunt (later of Watergate infamy), Robert Kennedy, the president’s killer Oswald, J. Edgar Hoover, Sinatra, Castro, CIA director Dulles.

The novel traces events from 1945 to the early sixties, though it begins in 1983 with real suspense. Ultimately the confusion leads Harry to Russia in order to unravel the enigma of Harlot. He takes along his thousand page memoir of his service in the CIA, ‘The Game’, and that is what we read as he sits in the Hotel Metropole reviewing his past and the questions it poses regarding the nature of clandestine activities. It is a conspiracy theorist’s dream, with the threat of violence never far away, most notably the Kennedy assassination.

Harry recounts in lengthy detail his postings in Berlin, to work under ‘the American James Bond’, the real life William King Harvey, now a dissolute bureau chief. He develops a sort of friendship with the schizophrenic Dix Butler.  When revealed to be Montague’s plant, Harry is next sent to Montevideo, Uruguay, under the tutelage of E. Howard Hunt. This is the book length part of the novel, reckoned by many to be its longueur, though I found it frequently involving in its depiction of surveillance tactics. When Harry is posted back home and on to Miami, he becomes embroiled in the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba, followed by Operation Mongoose, the plot to assassinate Fidel Castro. By now Harry is himself a veteran of espionage and increasingly ambivalent about his mentor.

The Cuban episode is the most dramatic and the closest to what we recognise as the accelerated and more public history of Cold War espionage. As Mailer observed at the turn into the seventies, ‘I have come to a place where I think it is almost impossible to go on with a novel unless one can transcend the domination of actual events — invariably more extraordinary and interesting than fiction.’ By now he had read widely and hoped his work would ‘bear more relation to the reality of these historical events than the spectrum of facts and often calculated misinformation that presently surrounds them.’ The result  is certainly convincing enough and doubtless an influence on the slew of film and tv treatments that have followed since. 

Harry Hubbard’s postings are the bones of the novel, but as with all stories the tale is in the telling. And here Mailer excels. He begins wonderfully, with a dark and stormy night on a Maine coast road, a big old isolated house on an island, and wreaths of mist (‘When I could no longer see anything at all I would pull the car over; then the grinding of the buoys would sound as mournful as the lowing of cattle in a rain-drenched field.’) On arrival at the house (the Keep) we half-see other wreaths that may be men; there is talk of a house ghost, of strange histories, of murder. Our hero has driven home from one infidelity to find another. All this in the first hundred pages, before Harry leaves for Moscow.

The novel is packed with characters — a few of them honest, many fanatical, all obsessive. Mailer captures them skilfully, especially the colourful. Here is his first boss : ‘Harvey sat at his desk, a phone to his ear, vest unbuttoned, the butts of two revolvers growing like horns out of his armpits. Wide in the middle, he looked heavy enough to waddle when he walked, and he reeked of gin and sen-sen tablets.’  

The dominant mood of the novel is, unsurprisingly, anxiety: ‘I live with a prime fear. My specific professional assignment invariably becomes my first fear. There is also, however, what Harlot used to call Queen-for-a-day. It is the old heart-in-throat on the day of battle.’ Mailer captures it in a night time assault on the Cuban coast: ‘Without a sound, all six of us pulled the dinghy twenty feet up the beach, enough to reach the shelter of a small sea-warped tree whose leaves bent so low as to paw the ground. In the night silence, a gourd fell. Its impact on landing was as raucous as the cry of an owl.’  

Fear breeds tough talk. Hence the callousness, the cruelty, the obscenity, the tough sex, the cynicism (‘Is [Howard} Hughes interested in Havana?’ ‘Who isn’t? Havana will put Las Vegas back in the desert again’). Fear also brings frustration for the agents: ‘The key to our lives, Harry, is in the drear word patience.  We are incompetent without it.’ It is true too of the bureaucracy that binds them: ‘“Politics is weather,” was Cal’s reaction. “We’ll just wait it out.’” In their world alertness is all and macho conversation has to take the place of action much of the time: 

‘Know what you need for this profession?’

‘No, sir.’

‘An understanding of light and shadow. When the light shifts, the shadow had better conform.’

Even the shadows have some appeal to the neophyte, like the young Harry: ‘It was in accord with my first impression of Berlin  —dusty, heavy, half-patched, grey, depressed, yet surprisingly libidinous. I felt depravity on every street corner, as real to me as vermin and neon lights.’ Libidinousness is, of course, a Mailer forte and there are innumerable instances here and throughout his fiction.

I found in Harlot’s Ghost some of that greatness and some of the recklessness I mentioned at the outset—and some of the exuberant overkill that characterises even Mailer’s best writing. If Harlot’s Ghost is his masterpiece, it is also perhaps a prescient one, given our own times. As the author ruminated in interview back then: ‘Fascism may be more to the tastes of the ruling powers in America than democracy… I’ve always had the fear that America would go totalitarian, and it may yet—there’s nothing guaranteed about a democracy.’ Nothing at all.

The novel’s last words are ‘To be continued’. I took that at first to be a lightly ironic touch, but it was meant in all seriousness. A pity it did not happen.