Many
years ago, I came across an Avon paperback of Jerusalem
Poker, by an author I had never heard of named Edward
Whittemore. It was a startling, imaginative, hilarious,
and complex tall tale of Middle Eastern politics and history,
at the center of which was a 12-year-long poker game,
beginning in 1921, with the ultimate prize being clandestine
control of the entire city of Jerusalem. I hardly ever
came across Whittemore's name again; it turns out that
Jerusalem Poker was one of only three of his five
novels to enjoy even brief mass-market paperback editions,
and that his hardcover sales never exceeded 5,000 copies
despite glowing reviews. Now all five novels have been
reissued by Old
Earth Books - which has previously reprinted works
by Doc Smith, James White, and Edgar Pangborn - and it
seems fair to say that this is by far their most significant
rediscovery and their most important publishing achievement
to date. Each volume comes with a biographical sketch
by Whittemore's agent Tom Wallace, a memoir by his editor
Judy Karasik, and an introduction by authors as varied
as John Nichols and Jay Neugeboren.
Whittemore - a
former Marine officer, CIA agent, and narcotics control
officer who died in 1995 - apparently possessed one
of the most bizarre and creatively paranoid historical
imaginations of the latter half of the 20th century.
At the time he was writing (all the novels were published
between 1974 and 1987), there wasn't much to compare
him to except Pynchon with whom he shares surface similarities,
but now that the crypto-historical novel has nearly
become a subgenre of its own in works by Tim Powers,
Christopher Priest, Neal Stephenson, and others, it
begins to look as though Whittemore was a story-teller
a decade or so in advance of his time; his baroquely
comic and conspiratorial view of history resonates so
richly today that there is virtually no sense of these
novels being dated. Often, undiscovered classics remain
undiscovered for good reasons but in Whittemore's case,
everyone seems to have missed the boat - perhaps because
of earlier attempts to position these as espionage novels
(which is a bit like trying to position Ulysses as a
walking tour of Dublin), even though his approach to
his material is that of a fantasist (one early reviewer
even compared him to Tolkien, and Jonathan Carroll and
Jeff VanderMeer have counted themselves among his admirers).
These are novels
that revel in the joy of storytelling, that embed shrewd
political insights in surrealist images (a 1937 picnic
in which three of the four participants are wearing
gas masks turns out to be what saved Moscow from the
Nazis - for reasons that make perfect sense when Whittemore
gets round to explaining them), that are unabashedly
fantastical in nature. (They are also, to be sure, enormous
shaggy-dog tales that may try the patience of readers
impatient with digression) I'm using the "fantastical" here to describe the tone of the writing and the intricacies
of plotting, but those who insist on elements of the
material fantastic can rest assured that one of the
characters who knits together the four volumes of Whittemore's
masterpiece the Jerusalem Quartet, is a 3000-year-old
shopkeeper who was once a knight errant and who operated
an all-night grocery during the Roman Empire, and that
other elements of fantasy and grotesquerie are peppered
throughout the novels, such as a Venetian palazzo, once
occupied by Byron, which vanishes entirely in a puff
of smoke.
Jerusalem Poker
(1978), which I'd read so long ago is the second
volume of the Quartet, which traces an elaborate secret
history of the Middle East from the early 19th century
through the early 1980s. An earlier stand-alone novel
(though with a few characters that reappear in the Quartet)
is Quin's Shanghai Circus (1974) which may serve
as a kind of primer for Whittemore's sometimes convoluted
narrative techniques and his gonzo approach to history.
That novel begins in 1965, when an immense con man named
Geraty arrives in New York on a freighter, bearing with
him "the largest collection of Japanese pornography
ever assembled in a Western tongue", a vast collection
of translated manuscripts dating from the 13th century.
In a Brooklyn bar once owned by his family, he arranges
to accidentally meet the 30-year-old Quin, claiming
that he knows secrets about the parents Quin never met,
and that these secrets involve a slightly retarded young
man named Big Gobi (after an espionage cell Quin's parents
belonged to) and an old, reclusive, and possibly crazy
priest in Tokyo.
Quin, together
with Big Gobi, sets sail to Tokyo to track down the
priest, Father Lamereaux, and to begin piecing together
the hidden roles that all these characters played in
the history of pre-war Japan and China (it was Lamereaux
and Quin's parents, for example, who participated in
that bizarre 1937 gas-mask picnic, together with an
even shadier figure named Adzhar, a brilliant Russian
chemist and linguist who had fled after an unsuccessful
attempt to assassinate the Czar in 1881 and who had
advised Trotsky that a revolution in 1917 would succeed
because it coincided with Passamaquoddy Indian cycles).
We also meet Mama, a nightclub owner who is the most
powerful woman in Japan (and who claims to have slept
with 10,000 men before turning 25); her brother (a torturer
who served time in Siberia and who later murdered the
Japanese general in charge of the rape of Nanking in
1937, and whose overcoat was stolen by Geraty); her
lover Baron Kikuchi and his older brother (who converts
to Judaism and becomes Rabbi Kikuchi-Lottman); the rabbi's
adopted son who becomes the third most powerful gangster
in the world; and a huge number of other characters,
all connected in intricate ways to each other and to
the major events of the period.
Lest all this seem
merely absurdist invention without gravity, Whittemore
makes two of the central events of the novel the rape
of Nanking, which is described with unflinching brutality,
and the circus of the title, staged for a group of wealthy "degenerates" in a Shanghai warehouse as World
War II looms. The performance, "a circus of the
mind," becomes a surreal manifestation of the pathological
horrors that underlie the historical turmoil of the
period, and it alone - as each act is sabotaged in increasingly
gruesome, ways - would qualify Quin's Shanghai Circus
for consideration as a horror novel. But as the novel
ends with Quin meeting once more with Geraty, now posing
as a holy man in a remote Japanese village, it becomes
clear that Whittemore's ambition has little to do with
genre and a great deal to do with the notion of history
as fantasy, as a complex interlocking of tales-within-tales
that can only be subsumed as elements of a vast untold
story.
This view becomes
even more clear, and far more complex, in the novels
that make up the Jerusalem Quartet. The first
of these, Sinai Tapestry (1977), establishes
the historical background for the entire series and
introduces characters whose disciples and descendants
will move the action into the 20th century. Plantagenet
Strongbow, an English earl born in 1819, is a near-mythical
figure who combines elements of Sir Richard Button and
Tarzan. Rejecting his family's comically decadent heritage
(for centuries, each new heir has died young in stupid
accidents, such as dozing off and falling into the fire
place), Strongbow becomes the "most awesome explorer
his country ever produced". A seven-foot seven-inch
giant, he turns himself into a legendary swordsman and
botanist while at Cambridge, but soon renounces everything
to disappear into the Middle East, where he becomes
a Bedouin Hakim, eventually produces a scandalous 33
volume history of Levantine sex, and at one point buys
the entire Ottoman Empire. An almost equally legendary
character is Skanderberg Wallenstein, born in Albania
in 1802 to exiles from the Holy Roman Empire, who becomes
a devoted Trappist monk and joins a monastery in Jerusalem.
There, while cleaning out an unused storeroom, he discovers
an ancient manuscript which not only is the oldest Bible
in the world, dating from 930 B.C., but which "denied
every religious truth ever held by anyone." He
further learns that this original Bible consisted of
the ramblings of a blind beggar transcribed literally
by an imbecile. Determined to suppress his discovery,
Wallenstein spends decades forging an alternate "original
Bible" which will preserve the major beliefs of
Christianity, Islam, and Judaism and which he will bury
and then rediscover in the place of the original. The
existence and location of the original "Sinai Bible" eventually becomes a powerful legend in Jerusalem (though
where it finally ends up is an off-the-wall twist even
for Whittemore).
Two other major
characters are the Irishman Joe O'Sullivan Beare, who
fled to the Holy Land disguised as a nun after the Easter
Uprising of 1916 and who is later mistaken for both
a Crimean War hero and Prester John; and Haj Harun,
the 3,000-year-old shopkeeper who once was a stonecarver
for the Assyrians, and beneath whose shop in the Old
City are caverns containing the remnants of dozens of
earlier Old Cities, where can be found, among other
things, 800-year old cognac and chapels built by the
Crusaders. In one of the quartet's most suggestive recurring
images, Haj Harun, who embodies the spirit of the city,
wears an ill-fitting Crusader's helmet which is constantly
shifting and shaking dust into his eyes. And there is
the American-born figure skater Maud, who travels to
Europe as part of the 1906 Olympic team, eventually
marrying Wallenstein's mad son Catherine (named after
the monastery where he discovered the Sinai Bible),
with whom she bears a son named Nubar, who becomes the
main villain of Jerusalem Poker. She later flees
to Jerusalem and falls in love with Beare, which whom
she has another son named Bernini. The remaining major
character is Strongbow's son, Stern, who grows up to
become a gunrunner obsessed with a utopian vision of
a new country that will be "a homeland for all
the peoples of his heritage," "one nation
embracing Arabs and Christians and Jews." Stern's
naive and increasingly compromised idealism comes to
dominate the final chapters of the novel, which ends
in Cairo in 1942.
Jerusalem Poker
(1978) returns the main action to 1921, when Beare
starts a poker game in Haj Harun's shop with Cairo Martyr,
a former Egyptian slave who has gained control of the
city's Arab quarter after building a fortune selling
mummy dust as an aphrodisiac and Monk Szondi, heir to
a Swiss family in which the men all became musicians
while the women (called the Sarahs) built a huge international
banking empire (which had nearly faced ruin when they
discovered that someone - who we now know to be Strongbow
- had bought the Ottoman Empire out from under them).
Links with the earlier novel abound. Cairo's mentor
was the great Egyptologist Menelik Ziwar, who had been
Strongbow's closest friend and carried on a forty-year-long
conversation with him, and his mother's grandmother
had spent time with the legendary Johann Luigi Szondi,
the father of Skanderberg Wallenstein and great-grandfather
of both Nubar Wallenstein and Munk Szondi. Nubar, the
son of Maud and Catherine Wallenstein grows up with
an obsessive interest in collecting all the existing
manuscripts of Paracelsis, spending a fortune developing
a network of book-hunters which evolves into a vast
criminal organization. When one of his spies reports
on the Great Jerusalem Poker Game, he decides to infiltrate
it and gain secret control of the city for himself.
While the game itself, with unsuccessful challengers
losing vast fortunes and suffering strange punishments
over the years, provides a continuous narrative arc
for the various tales within tales (and it does finally
have a winner), the novel itself is another tapestry
or mosaic (to use terms from other Whittemore titles),
although the infinite shifting and recombining of the
cards may be an even more apt metaphor for the ways
in which Whittemore structures his books.
The final two novels
in the quartet, Nile Shadows (1983) and Jericho
Mosaic (1987), edge more clearly toward the espionage
tale, but an espionage tale given mythic dimensions
by the huge historical tapestry which we now know preceded
it. Nile Shadows begins in Cairo in 1942, as
Rommel's tanks are approaching the city, when a hand
grenade thrown in a Cairo slum kills a petty thief and
gunrunner named Stern But some oddities in Stem's file,
including an inexplicable escape from a Damascus prison
in 1939 shortly before he was to be released, have already
caught the attention of Allied Intelligence. O'Sullivan
Beare, now living as a Hopi shaman in Arizona, becomes
a real wartime spy, recruited to track down the story
of Stem's life, since it's not at all clear who Stern's
gunrunning was supposed to benefit. Headquartered in
a former brothel called the Hotel Babylon and working
with strangely disfigured agents (the most colorful
of whom is named Bletchley) from competing intelligence
operations called the Waterboys and the Monastery, Beare
begins to unravel the secrets of Stern's life in an
investigation that again takes him decades into the
past, invoking such familiar names as Menelik Ziwar
and Strongbow while introducing newer ones such as David
Cohen and the Hotel Babylon bartender Ahmad, both of
whom were friends of Stem and each of whom had family
connections to Menelik Ziwar and Strongbow. Although
more focused on a single investigation and less panoramic
than the earlier novels, this novel, too, uses its central
plot element as a central metaphor - in this case, the
shifting loyalties and uncertain identities of espionage,
which seem merely political echoes of how individuals
form their own secret alliances to survive, and to influence
others.
Jericho Mosaic,
the final novel in the series, finally moves beyond
the overt shadows of Strongbow and the other mythic
figures (though there are recurring characters from
Nile Shadows, and the protagonist's spyrnaster
knew in his youth of the Great Jerusalem Poker Game
and the Sinai Bible). Set mostly in Jerusalem, Damascus,
and Jericho, the novel's central character is Yossi,
who is trained to be a master deep-cover agent named
Halim (his tale is supposedly loosely based on the real-life
career of Israeli master spy Eli Cohen). While much
of the novel details how a master spy is created, the
novel also offers vivid accounts of the Six-Day War,
the origins of the PLO, the Yom Kippur War of 1973,
and the Lebanese civil war. Whittemore's insights as
a political analyst are as much on display as his storytelling
inventiveness, and the novel concludes by bringing his
mythic secret history into a remarkably insightful and
credible portrait of the dark realpolitik of the current
Middle East. As a whole, the Jerusalem Quartet
is one of the most remarkable examples in recent literature
of how an author may transform history into myth, and
then return us to received history while forcing us
to see it in an entirely new light.
Review by Gary
K Wolfe
This review is
reprinted with permission from Locus
Magazine - Issue 506 Volume 50 No3 - March 2003
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