Harlot's Ghost: A Novel

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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 that, in a particularly harrowing scene, Dix tries, unsuccessfully but deeply affectingly, to rape or seduce the still virginal young man. race and makes off with Hugh's wife, Kittredge. (True, she leaves him later for Dix, but not to worry: Dix is yet another authorial stand-in, the artist as Devil incarnate.) And Harry becomes Hugh's -- Harlot's -- ghost:

Christian in many a rich swine. It goes so deep -- this simple idea that nobody on earth should have too much wealth. That's exactly what's satanic about Communism. It trades on the noblest vein in Christianity. It works Contemporary historians like Theodore Draper, Arthur Schlesinger and Garry Wills, or political journalists like Seymour Hersh, Lou Cannon and Robert Woodward, deal with this difficulty in various ways, but seldom succeed for long in firing the general consciousness. This is because they are either apologists for power (Schlesinger, Woodward) or its intimates (Schlesinger, Woodward) or politically conditioned to disbelieve the worst (Schlesinger, Woodward). Men like Wills and Draper, on the other hand, are almost too bloody rational. They are careful to speak truth to power and to weigh evidence with scruple, but they are wedded to the respectable and predictable rhythms of academe, of research, of high and serious mentation. They find and pronounce on corruption and malfeasance, and gravely too, but it’s always as if the horror is somehow an invasion or interruption. This is why the permanent underworld of American public life has only ever been captured and distilled by novelists.The ultimate power becomes the ability to kill others ("the sense of realization you can get killing another human,""There's an awful fascination to be found in eliminating one's fellow man"), the sexual pinnacle is to have He has a torrid affair with Sally Porringer, the wife of one of his colleagues (and one of Mailer's most touchingly delineated characters), gets involved with Uruguay's most spectacular courtesan (a hermaphrodite who underwent

This is not the ‘thin line’ of Draper’s inquiry. Relying almost exclusively on the written record and his skill as a historian, he tries to compose a history of the present. But with knowledge, memory and desire left opaque, and without the promiscuity that is permitted to the freelance speculator, all he can do is show – employing their own words and memos – that the American Constitution was deliberately put at risk by a group of unelected, paranoid Manicheans. This in itself is one of the scholarly achievements of the decade.Harlot's Ghost," then, begins with a prologue-cum-epilogue in which Harry talks about family prehistory, much of it taking place at the Keep, a residence of the Hubbards on a Maine island, haunted by the ghost of Augustus Farr, a pirate Throughout the book he has a tendency to get carried away with his imagery, as when Hugh, Kittredge and Harry attend one of Lenny Bruce's performances, and suddenly "the most incredible sound issued unexpectedly from 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 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

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.’

most of this up, then bend it to fit in with his fictional characters -- who tend to pale by comparison -- only to end up with an arbitrary, lopsided, lumpy novel that outstays its welcome. And keeps on outstaying it. A good question, but perhaps one that only literature can answer. ‘Critics’– the press, the academics, the think-tankers – do not care to admit that they missed the big story or the big case. Nor do they get their living by making trouble for the Establishment. 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,

Faulkner upon their passing. It is comforting to think that C.I.A. personnel, no longer needed as cold war fighters against a now democratic Soviet Union, will be able to slip easefully into a new role as preservers of humanistic culture. and joy is a tunnel he has had secretly dug from West into East Berlin. In this game of espionage and counterespionage, where ex-Nazis may be running the West German equivalent of the C.I.A., and every German is a double agent if not of olden days. The Keep is eventually bought by Hugh Montague, whose C.I.A. code name is Harlot -- unusual, but then Hugh is altogether extraordinary -- where he lives with Kittredge and their young son, Christopher. Hugh has not only us an aria with carefully chosen dissonances?" Hugh gets grander and grander, but Harry's reactions may be grandest of all -- as when Hugh's use of the word "artist" for a counterspy elicits from his discipleabove 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. 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. a powerful epigram, such as "Irrationality is the only great engine of history," and already he is off on "I see the Company [ C.I.A. ] as one huge Alpha and Omega." 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