In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

© Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d’études américaines 31, no. 3, 2001 Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost: Yet Another Big Book Barry H. Leeds In 1959, Norman Mailer aired an ambition in Advertisements for Myself which he must have known and intended that the literary world would never let him forget : to “try to hit the longest ball ever to go up into the accelerated hurricane air of our American letters” (477). Since then, Mailer has written many books, several of them massive in size and scope, which his detractors have rejected as failed attempts to fulfill this promise. Writing in the New York Times Book Review on The Executioner’s Song, Joan Didion described this critical phenomenon best when she forcefully insisted: It is one of those testimonies to the tenacity of self-regard in the literary life that large numbers of people remain persuaded that Norman Mailer is no better than their reading of him. They condescend to him, they dismiss his most original work in favour of the more literal and predictable rhythms of The Armies of the Night; they regard The Naked and the Dead as a promise later broken and every book since as a quick turn for his creditors, a stalling action, a spangled substitute, tarted up to deceive, for the “big book” he cannot write. In fact, he has written this “big book” at least three times now. He wrote it the first time in 1955 with The Deer Park and he wrote it a second time in 1965 with An American Dream and he wrote it a third time in 1967 with Why Are We in Vietnam? and now, with The Executioner’s Song, he has probably written it a fourth. (Didion) Now comes Harlot’s Ghost, another “big book” (1310 pages), which, following such cinderblock-sized works as The Executioner’s Song and Ancient Evenings, gives the lie yet again to such cavilling critics. What can one say about Harlot’s Ghost that hasn’t already been said in the virtual ream of reviews, the mass media articles about its publication, and the videotape library of interviews with its author, who at age 68 showed signs of mellowing but not of slowing down? Plenty. For one thing, except for brief and generally facile allusions to a few earlier works, no one has explored the extent to which the novel is profoundly rooted in the recurrent thematic preoccupations of Mailer’s Canadian Review of American Studies 31 (2001) 160 enormous body of work – spanning half a century – and at the same time recognized that it leaps forward to break new artistic ground. To begin with, the relationship between the protagonist, Herrick (Harry/ Rick) Hubbard, from his privileged boarding school and Yale education to his lifetime career in the CIA, with his godfather and mentor, the titular “Harlot” (a CIA cryptonym for Hugh Tremont Montague) – echoes several earlier Mailer tutor-tyro relationships. These range from the problematic and sexually coloured connection of General Cummings and Lieutenant Robert Hearn in The Naked and the Dead, through the more benign influences of McLeod upon Mikey Lovett in Barbary Shore and Charles Eitel on Sergius O’Shaugnessy in The Deer Park, to the insidious temptation of Stephen Rojack by Barney Oswald Kelly in An American Dream. The new departure which marks one of the virtues of Tough Guys Don’t Dance is that Mailer created a moving father/son relationship between Tim Madden and his memorable and larger-than-life father, Dougy. This is echoed in Harlot’s Ghost by Harry’s growing emotional ties to his father, Boardman Kimball (Cal) Hubbard (a.k.a. Halifax). As a second generation CIA agent and nth generation patrician, Harry is quite different from Tim Madden, as his father is quite different intellectually from Dougy, the huge, rough-hewn barkeeper of the earlier novel. Yet the similarities are more profound and telling than the superficial differences: Both sons ultimately gain the love and approval of their fathers by means of resourcefulness , courage, and force of will rather than more abstract or intellectual capabilities. Finally, the problematic and often adversarial friendship between Harry and his fellow...

pdf

Share