Norman Mailer will not R I P
By
Saul Landau Read Spanish Version
As
a teenager, I learned to appreciate fiction by reading The
Naked and the Dead.
High school teachers force fed us The
Odyssey
and The
Iliad
and other “classics,” but Mailer gave teenage boys thirsty for
sex and violence (vicariously, of course) a reason to read.
In
the 1960s, Mailer turned anti-war activist and reporter. Not all his
books succeeded in achieving the literary excellence he demanded, but
he retained his courage and determination to express ideas about
subjects most writers avoid.
In
his personal life he often behaved like an immature,
publicity-seeking asshole, picking fights and causes without thought.
In that sense he also represented a large stain and strain of
American life. His death at 84 represents a loss of a national
treasure.
The
obituaries on Norman Mailer offer little or no space to his literary
contribution that offers unique insight into the Cold War. Harlot’s
Ghost
explored the U.S.-Soviet clash as no historian or sociologist dared
— or had the capacity to probe.
By
using Herrick "Harry" Hubbard, a CIA officer, as his
protagonist who somehow finds himself present at CIA designed coups,
failed invasions (Bay of Pigs) and other Cold War milestones, Mailer
explores the real life acting company that played its parts in the
four decade long drama of the late 20th
Century, a group of spiritually agitated — even bored — Nabobs and
lower class types they were forced to acquire acting out a dangerous
high stakes game. Like their playboy ancestors in Fitzgerald’s The
Great Gatsby,
these capricious and irresponsible adult brats, who eschewed concepts
like patriotism and loyalty, thought to satisfy their whims by
playing Cold War on the world stage.
Mailer,
through fiction, showed the ridiculous world of the Ivy League
preachers and professors, the sons and daughters of old wealth, who
wrote the script for the supposed clash of Mammoth Powers. The United
States has not had a rival since England. It created the Soviet Union
as a super power in order to play the most exciting game in all of
history, one that became downright frightening in 1949 when the
Soviets achieved nuclear weapons.
The
Soviets possessed nothing but those weapons to challenge U.S. power.
They never developed a viable economy; nor did they achieve the
ability to export a competitive culture — a la Hollywood and Madison
Avenue. Imagine, Soviets programming TV and radio stations and trying
to offer fare equal to 24/7 shopping, flesh almighty and bang bang
bang!
Mailer
begins his novel in the early 1980s. He picks up from F. Scott
Fitzgerald in describing the wealthy and irresponsible WASPs in New
England, a man with a solid reputation, a pedigreed wife (at home)
and an equally aristocratic, but much hotter mistress — his cousin
no less.
Harry’s
godfather and guru, Harlot, has apparently blown himself away — like
some real CIA bigwigs did. In this case, the dead man represented
counterintelligence. But, like several CIA hotshots, he may have been
a KGB mole. Indeed, his death might also fall into the realm of cloak
and daggerdom.
Harry’s
wife, Kittredge, once Harlot’s femme fatale,
has
been bonking Harry’s CIA pal and sometimes foe, Dix Butler. Dix
adores criminal behavior and will commit almost any bizarre act to
make money — including assassinate his wife.
Mailer’s characters covering walk in and out of episodes that cover
decades of personal and national misalliances and betrayals. At each
turn, the reader finds the leaders of U.S. “intelligence” to lack
any ideological foundation except to their own capricious pleasures.
The
top CIA dogs in the book helped create the myth of Soviet power while
politicians and media flaks sold their bullshit to the public. Mailer
explores major CIA fiascos carried out in the name of advancing
freedom or gathering advantages in the Cold War: In the 1950s, they
dug the Berlin Tunnel under KGB headquarters only to discover they
had fallen into a KGB trap; they launched the invasion of Cuba after
convincing themselves Cuba would fall like Guatemalan President
Arbenz did in 1954 in a similar “invasion.” The inventors of
these plans really don’t care about consequences — then or now.
Mailer also explores assassination plots — and the bizarre set of
assassins the Agency chose — to kill Castro.
We
meet the top dogs, like Allen Dulles and the psychopathic planners of
hits, like, E. Howard Hunt. The history of the CIA is after all the
abbreviated nuts and bolts of Cold War history.
The
characters playing the lead roles are seriously disturbed. A CIA
psychologist plays with deadly drugs and studies the psychic
processes by which covert ops adapt to multiple identities — all
this nonsense in the name of defending freedom.
The
WASPS who lead the adventurous game know the Soviets pose no threat.
When Harry, the eager
young CIA op
discovers that the Soviets never adjusted their railroad gauges to
coincide with those of Eastern Europe, thus making impossible a
notion of supplying troops invading Western Europe, his superior
tells him not to report that information. If the public should get
wise that the CIA and its political and media cohorts had invented
the “Soviet threat” to attack the West, the Cold War would end —
and with it the grand adventure. The mass media never reported this
“little fact.” Imagine pubic reaction to a report that the
supposed Soviet attack plan against the West required supplies for
its armies to stop at the Eastern Europe borders, get unloaded onto
trucks and then reloaded onto different trains! Hardly a scenario for
lightning surprise attack!
The
gurus of Mailer’s great game are Protestant ministers, literature
professors, rock climbing addicts and practitioners of sexual
perversity — much like the old European aristocracy for whom old
fashioned sex had become a yawn.
Mailer
had previously reported on the Vietnam War, spoken at anti-war
demonstrations and wrote an allegorical novel (Why
Are We In Vietnam?)
using a group of Texans hunting grizzly bears in Alaska as his
metaphor for U.S. engagement in Southeast Asia. Americans hunt
whatever happens to be around, the novel suggests. Vietnam presented
the leading hunters (Presidents) with a chance to seek a new kind of
prey. And they use technology to achieve their success: helicopters
to help them find and destroy the bears. Yet, there is a trace of
admiration, even longing in Mailer’s often comic descriptions of
the super macho characters. This short but pugnacious Jewish
intellectual wanted to be a tough guy, and when he tried to be one at
cocktail parties or luncheons, he invariably made a fool of himself.
And his behavior found its way into the media.
His
bad boy image, however, didn’t stop Mailer from expressing his
insights into the real tough guys, the killers who didn’t seem to
possess a soul, who could not be explained by poverty or parental
abuse. Such a character, Gary Gilmore, became central in The
Executioner’s Song,
where Mailer paints an original picture of what Joan Didion called
“that vast emptiness at the center of the Western experience, a
nihilism antithetical not only to literature but to most other forms
of human endeavor, a dread so close to zero that human voices
fadeout, trail off, like skywriting.” (New
York Times,
October 7, 1979)
Mailer
writes a painful sketch of Gary Gilmore, the murderer. He offers a
detailed sociological fact sheet on Mormon passivity in the face of a
killer in their midst. He analyzes and explains the absurdities of
the police and legal system before a person gets executed.
Mailer
tackled the big issues: war, corruption, hypocrisy at the highest
levels.
He
also loved publicity and the art of coining the perfect phrase. He
was homophobic and misogynistic. Indeed, Mailer never learned to
portray women in a realistic dimension. He clearly didn’t
understand them; not a comment on his six wives.
Mailer
understood American duplicity, the fog of religious-based freedom
rhetoric that covers the most devious political behavior. He also
understood the banality that marries heroism in war. In The
Naked and The
Dead
the six remaining platoon members share a mission. A Jew, some non
Jews and a few anti-Semites, some learned and some ignorant, all
share the same horrid conditions on a Pacific island. This is
Mailer’s American democracy, the bonding of mismatches in
battlefield conditions. Equally American is the troops killing
Japanese POWs and stealing souvenirs from enemy corpses. They worry
about their wives screwing other guys while feeling a little uneasy
about screwing other women. Then, they discover their mission —
which killed more than half of them — meant absolutely nothing in
winning the war. He
could have been writing about almost any war.
Saul
Landau is an Institute for Policy Studies Fellow and author of A
BUSH AND BOTOX WORLD,
His new award-winning film, WE
DON’T PLAY GOLF HERE,
is available through roundworldproductions@gmail.com.
