Harlot's Ghost

National Review, Nov 4, 1991 by Richard Ryan

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, in his arresting "Cautious Man," tells the story of a man with two words tattooed on his hands: "Love" on the right, "Fear" on the left. Such an allegory of sundered human nature supports the bulk of Norman Mailer's massive yet incomplete Harlot's Ghost. It is an appropriate theme for a work with equal divisions of brilliance and inanity competing for its soul.

Harlot's Ghost narrates the life of Herrick "Harry" Hubbard, a second-generation career CIA officer who, as the novel opens, is ensconced, circa 1983, in a WASP's idea of Valhallasemi-retirement at a family home on the Maine coast, with a blue-blooded wife upstairs and a hot-blooded mistress in town. Harry's life of sedate deterioration is disrupted one night when news comes from Washington that his godfather and professional rabbi, Hugh Montague (nom de guerre, Harlot), has turned up in Chesapeake Bay with his face blown off-an apparent suicide. (Intelligence buffs will recognize the enigmatic death of CIA analyst John Arthur Paisley as the basis for this incident.) Harlot, the high-priest of American counterintelligence for three decades, is now suspected of having been a Soviet agent all along, and of having faked his own death in order to exit stage far left.

It also emerges that Harry's wife, Kittredge, was previously married to the much-older Harlot. Kittredge and Harry's marriage, founded on betrayal, comes apart as the lady of the house reveals to her unraveling husband that she has been dallying with his old comrade and rival, Dix Butler. (Butler, a sort of shaman of focused violence and criminal elan, emerges as one of the book's more interesting characters. Mailer has modeled him on Edwin Wilson, the renegade CIA agent who sold arms to Qaddafi and later tried to arrange the assassination of his wife and a U.S. prosecutor.) Kittredge disappears and Harry goes underground, hiding first in New York, and finally fleeing to Moscow in hopes of finding Harlot. Sitting in Moscow's Hotel Metropol, he views on microfilm the secret memoirs of his early career, following himself and his fellow characters through the digging of the Berlin Tunnel, the Bay of Pigs, the plot to kill Castro, and the Kennedy assassination. Allen Dulles, E. Howard Hunt, and a variety of covert personae fill up the lengthening manuscript, and are often divertingly drawn. Nevertheless, given Mailer's metaphysical slant, the novel's historical pretensions are less interesting than its Hawthornian concentration on infidelity and spiritual unrest. The novel's ostensible function as a fictionalized history of the CIA doesn't need (or stand) much scrutiny. The novel's flimsy connection to historical reality is actually one of its strengths: Mailer's interest in the perverse and secretive side of human psychology overrides his adolescent brand of leftist politics, and readers will not have to believe that the CIA engineered the Kennedy assassination or Watergate to find the book compelling.

The real drama of the novel revolves around Harry's deepening sense of the split personality inside all of us: not a good self versus a bad self, but, more to the point, a public self versus a secret self. Kittredge-Harry and Harlot's shared wife-has, in her demented career as a CIA psychologist, elaborated on these ideas in an effort to explain the mental dynamics that make it possible for agents to lead double lives. This sounds a bit like the ego /id breakdown, but as lattredge insists (and Harry comes to believe) the "Alpha and Omega" are in fact complete personalities inhabiting one body. And although Mailer sometimes rides this horse a little too hard, it serves as a suggestive schema for the compartmentalized lives of the characters, who must defend freedom through cunning and treachery.

Because there are real ideas going off throughout its twisting plot, and despite its prolixity and aroma of existential hysteria, I found Harlot's Ghost frequently engaging; there's nothing like watching a sharp-edged eccentric tease his obsessions for flashes of satori. Still, not all readers will be equally amused. Harlot's Ghost is unquestionably a post-modern work, with all of that movement's distinctive hallmarks of textual playfulness-nested manuscripts, blended literary genres, the juggling of historical fact and wild imagination. This sort of knowing artfulness will not command every serious reader's attention: post-modern writing, with all its quirks and affectations, rarely compels assent. And yet it may someday be agreed that this was an impressive contribution to the vaults of fin-demillenaire literature: I think readers will find more wisdom in Mailer's dualist psychology than in, say, Pynchon's spectacular but frivolous paranoia.

Harlot's Ghost could without a doubt have been more polished. Mailer's famous over-writing lapses at times into sophomoric symbolism: the ghost of an old pirate, Augustus Farr, lives in the basement of Harry's Maine home, radiating bad vibes and standing in as the subliminal saint of bloodthirsty imperialism; a hermaphroditic Uruguayan prostitute wanders through the South American section of the book like a flashing neon sign, advertising our treacherous and ambivalent sexuality. Mailer also leaves us lusting for a sympathetic, three-dimensional female character: lattredge amounts to little more than an annoying Ophelia-retread, a madwoman babbling psychedelic epigrams; and Modene Murphy-the Judith Exner walk-on who slinks through the Cuban chapters-is, despite Mailer's attempt to present her as a feminine archetype, a standard three-martini tart.