Harlot's Ghost: A Novel

Product Information

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 But there are aspects of Mailer's fiction that are less endearing. I am not even thinking of such minor absurdities as the fixation on bodily effluvia and odors (thus the Nazi maid in "An American Dream," whom the hero possesses anally,

The C.I.A. does go in for musical analogies. Thus Allen Dulles, from the audience, interrupts Hugh's lecture with an operatic trope for Communist fallibility: "When we have to listen to an awfully vain tenor who can never hit his high note, It is not easy to be sure that Mailer's much-headlined life doesn't color one's judgment, but the author of "Harlot's Ghost" does come across as a punch-drunk writer trying to outbox all competition, real or imaginary. Who Rochant, who alsois developing a global spy thriller with Snowpiercer producer Tomorrow Studios, will write, direct, exec produce and showrun the project.with Hugh an orgy farm that Dix runs near Washington, and sleeps repeatedly with that ruthless fellow, who, as a C.I.A. man, would torture the spies who worked for him: urinate on them when tied up in an S & M joint, force their Gordon added: “Eric is a master storyteller. Le Bureau is one of the best television series in years, and we can’t wait to see how he brings that same deftness and vast creative vision to Mailer’s intricate web of spies. It is the perfect match of creator and material, and we are so excited to collaborate with him on this project.” EXCLUSIVE: Mark Gordon Pictures is moving along with its series adaptation of Norman Mailer’s spy epic Harlot’s Ghost. we do grow fond of him after a time. His very inability finally offers the dependable pleasure." This is true neither to tenors nor to the tone of Allen Dulles -- nor, I should think, to the tenor of C.I.A. discussions; but it

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 Mailer's C.I.A., it must be noted, is very strong in the humanities. The talk here is full of erudite references to Alexander Calder, Henry Miller, Henry James, Hemingway, Melville, Kant, Lautreamont, Joyce, Kierkegaard, the Oxford English Dictionary, Next, in Part Four, Harry is posted to Montevideo, Uruguay, where he is no longer an apprentice as in Berlin, but a budding spymaster working under none other than E. Howard Hunt, a formidable figure whose "long pointed nose had an indentation just 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, visitsThis Uruguayan section, encompassing the years 1956 to 1959, affords Mailer a chance to display his knowledge of the uneasy interaction between American diplomatic personnel and the C.I.A. guys for whom they must provide cover, even as other sections three of its employees), is such a spellbinding re-creation of momentous events that the length of the first installment is well earned, and the wait for the second, however long, amply justified. Or you may feel that Mailer, though

Draper’s task may be linked to that of an anatomist or dissecter, going coolly about his work while the bleeding and reeking corpse is still thrashing about on the slab. In his mild introduction, he confesses the ‘horror’ he felt when he saw the growing mountain of evidenceand testimony that was heaping up in front of him. Nor was it just a matter of meticulous forensic investigation. Two elements of mania pervaded the case and pervade it still. First, the principals in the conspiracy all claimed, and claim, to have amnesia. Second, they all behave as if they had been working for King Henry II. It became a bizarre question of interpreting a President’s desires: protecting that same President from the consequences of his desires and then redefining knowledge and participation so as to elude or outwit the law. Always look to the language. In this case, the giveaway keyword was the ‘finding’– a semi-fictional document which conferred retrospective Presidential approval for policies that had often been already executed. Ordinary idiom became unusable in this context. Robert Gates, who is now George Bush’s nominee to head the CIA, was at the material time William Casey’s deputy. He told Congress in 1987 that when advised of the ‘diversion’ of funds from the Iran to the Contra side of the hyphen, his ‘first reaction’ was to tell his informant that ‘I didn’t want to know any more about it.’Berlin and bildungsroman, you say. OK, so he’s a camera: get on with it. But, self-plagiarism apart, I think that Mailer is distilling an important knowledge from his many earlier reflections on violence and perversity and low life. As Balzac knew, and as Dix Butler boasts, the criminal and sexual outlaw world may be anarchic, but it is also servile and deferential. It is, to put it crudely, generally right-wing. It is also for sale. (Berlin has seen this point made before.) Berlin was the place where the CIA, busily engaged in recruiting hard-core ex-Nazis for the Kulturkampf against Moscow, first knew sin. First engaged in prostitution. First thought about frame-ups and tunnels and ‘doubles’ and (good phrase, you have to admit) ‘wet jobs’. More specifically – because this hadn’t been true of its infant OSS predecessor in the Second World War – it first began to conceive of American democracy as a weakling affair, as a potential liability; even as an enemy. his most effective work was Harlot’s Ghost (1991), about the Central Intelligence Agency. His final novels took Jesus Christ ( The Gospel According to the Son [1997]) and Adolf Hitler ( The Castle in the Forest [2007]) as their subjects. Read More Louis XVIII died, in possession of secrets which will remain secret from the best-informed historians. The struggle between the General Police of the Kingdom and the Counter-Police of the King gave rise to dreadful affairs whose secret was hushed on more than one scaffold. The FBI and the CIA do employ undercover men of terrible character?’ And Allen Dulles, in all the bonhomie of a good fellow who can summon up the services of a multitude of street ruffians, replied, ‘Yes, terribly bad characters.’ This not always successful supersession of the powerful but slightly corrupt father figure has been a paradigm of Mailer's fiction since the start: Lieutenant Hearn and General Cummings in "The Naked and the Dead"; Sergius O'Shaughnessy

The crowning refinement, of course, is to supplant your own father -- by overcoming him in a test of strength, and by taking his woman away from him. Here Harry, Mailer's alter ego, has two fathers: Cal and Hugh. He finally defeats Cal in a foot that, in a particularly harrowing scene, Dix tries, unsuccessfully but deeply affectingly, to rape or seduce the still virginal young man. Unforgiving, Kittredge marries Harry, who once saved her from suicide. Lovemaking with Kittredge is "fabulous," what with Harry introducing her to the joys of French sex, whereas Hugh never went beyond Italian. But though copulation with Kittredge finer, but their marketing of ideas proves superior. Here, those of us who are serious, tend to approach God alone, each of us, one by one, but the Soviets are able to perform the conversion en masse. That is because they deliver theFine phrases about the freedom of the individual and the inviolability of the home were exchanged between the Minister of State and the Prefect, to whom M. de Sérisy pointed out that the major interests of the country sometimes required secret illegalities, crime beginning only when State means were applied to private interests. Those who complain of the banality of American political life seem at first review to have every sort of justification. Political parties are vestigial; the ideological temperature is kept as nearly as is bearable to ‘room’; there is no Parliamentary dialectic in Congressional ‘debates’; elections are a drawn-out catchpenny charade invariably won, as Gore Vidal points out, by the abstainers; the political idiom is a consensual form (‘healing process’, ‘bipartisan’, ‘dialogue’) of langue de bois and the pundits are of a greyness and mediocrity better passed over than described. Periodic inquests are convened, usually by means of the stupid aggregate of the opinion poll, to express concern about apathy and depoliticisation, but it’s more consoling to assume that people’s immense indifference is itself a wholesome symptom of disdain. Yet this gruff, stupid masculine world is set on its ears by one courtesan. ‘Modene Murphy’, who is Mailer’s greatest failure of characterisation here, is perhaps such a failure because she has to do so much duty. In the novel as in life, she has to supply the carnal link between JFK, Frank Sinatra and the mob leader Sam Giancana. (Ben Bradlee, JFK’s hagiographer and confidant, says that one of the worst moments of his life came when he saw the diaries of Judith Campbell Exner and found that she did indeed, as she had claimed, have the private telephone codes of the JFK White House, which changed every weekend.) 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