Three
writers, above all others, have served as touchstones
for my own fiction. All three display stylistic mastery,
contain hidden depths, and reward repeated re-reading.
Of the three, Vladimir Nabokov achieved fame during
his lifetime, Angela Carter achieved fame after her
death, and the third, Edward Whittemore (1933-1995),
remains largely unknown.
Until this month,
Whittemore was out of print as well, Old Earth finally
bringing all five of his books back from the dead: Quin's
Shanghai Circus (1974) 1
and the Jerusalem Quartet, Sinai Tapestry (1977), Jerusalem
Poker (1978), Nile Shadows (1983), and Jericho Mosaic
(1987). The Old Earth editions, handsome and colorful,
come complete with introductions from writers such as
John Nichols and forewords and afterwords from Whittemore's
agent and his editors.2
The timing of Whittemore's resurrection could not be
more fortuitous, although I cannot ignore a mingled
sadness and irritation that for almost 20 years such
remarkable books were unavailable to readers.
The timing is fortuitous because this year, for the
first time ever, I have begun to feel that the idea
of cross-genre fiction 3
- unclassifiable and yet with a clearly fabulist, nonrealistic
bent - has become a concrete entity, expressed in physical
form in a number of truly wonderful works.4
Between 2000 and the present, we have witnessed the
emergence of a number of great writers. In addition,
writers who have always been producing this kind of
work - including Rikki Ducornet (perhaps the finest
fantasist currently alive on the planet) - have written
some of their best fiction yet. Factor in the appearance
this year of not one, not two, but four anthologies
or magazine issues devoted to cross-genre short fiction
- Conjunctions 39, my own (co-edited) Leviathan 3, Angel
Body (BBR, UK), and Polyphony 1; almost 1,800 pages
of cross-pollination - and a sea change seems in the
air.
However, Whittemore, among others, got there a generation
or two earlier 5
- and he remains one of the best because his ambition
was so much greater than that of most writers. With
his Jerusalem Quartet, Whittemore set out to do nothing
less than map a secret history of the world, focusing
on the Middle East, where a welter of religions converge,
sometimes with tragic results. The novels are loosely
related, in that several memorable protagonists appear
in all four, slipping in and out of the narrative as
walk-on, secondary, and main characters. Inasmuch as
The Jerusalem Quartet tells one story, it follows the
exploits of a man named Stern Strongbow, who hopes to
create peace in the Middle East. It also covers the
years 1900 through 1975, weaving together different
times and places for a thematic resonance that far exceeds
anything Thomas Pynchon accomplished in his excellent
book V.6
In Jerusalem Poker,
for example, Whittemore launches his novel with a typically
audacious image, one of the great prologues in literature.
The novel opens atop the Great Pyramid, where the sun
rises on a summer day in 1914. A man named Cairo Martyr,
at the time a male prostitute, has just helped a jaded,
obese pair of Egyptian aristocrats achieve orgasm, when
a triplane flies overhead:
Down, [Cairo]
yelled. Down... But the delirious baron and baroness
heard neither him nor the airplane. The great red
ball on the horizon had hypnotized them with the heat
it sent rushing through their aging bodies. Gaily
the plane dipped its wings in salute to the most impressive
monument ever reared by man, then gracefully rolled
away and sped on south... Cairo Martyr got to his
feet, not believing what he saw. The nearly invisible
man and woman still stood on the summit with their
arms outstretched, but now they were headless, cleanly
decapitated by the slashing lowest wing of the triplane.
The hulking bodies lingered a few seconds longer,
then slowly toppled over and disappeared down the
far side of the pyramid.
This image is followed
by an even more audacious idea. On the last day of December
1921, the Moslem Cairo Martyr, the Christian O'Sullivan
Beare, and the Jew Munk Szondi, who each control part
of Jerusalem, begin a game of poker, with the holy city
in the kitty. The poker game lasts 12 years and as it
unfolds Whittemore tells the stories of all three players,
almost incidentally telling the history of the Levant
as well. The intertwined tapestry formed by the present
interacting with the past is stunning in its complexity,
but also in its ability to entertain us. To call Jerusalem
Poker One Hundred Years of Solitude with spies would
be entirely accurate. Nor can I overstate the way in
which absurdity and the serious commingle in this novel.
And, although all three main characters - and the possibly
3,000-year-old owner of the antiquities shop in which
the poker game takes place - seem larger-than-life when
the novel opens, Whittemore shows us that, in fact,
they have lived extraordinary lives. They have earned
their colorful eccentricities, often quite poignantly.
Whittemore also earned his extraordinary life. While
the dual tragedy of Whittemore's life was the relative
brevity of that life and the short half-life of his
books on bookstore shelves, many of us would trade ours
for his, I think. After attending Yale University, Whittemore
served as a Marine officer in Japan and "spent
10 years as a CIA operative in the Far East, Europe,
and the Middle East," as the biography on the back
of the Old Earth editions reads. "Among his other
occupations, he managed a newspaper in Greece, was employed
by a shoe company in Italy, and worked in New York City's
narcotics control office during the Lindsay administration." One is tempted to ask if Whittemore worked for the CIA
while managing a newspaper in Greece and employed at
a shoe company in Italy.
Regardless, Whittemore's CIA work, his first-hand experience
in the Middle East, clearly informs the novels. It is
what distinguishes them in many ways from other espionage
fictions: a level of verisimilitude, the sense of someone
who has peered beneath the surface leading you through
the canyons and up the mountains of history.7
The character Stern Strongbow, a visionary and sometimes
spy, who inhabits all of the Jerusalem Quartet in some
guise, displays complexities to his character that only
someone with Whittemore's background could have rendered
properly. Stern, the son of Plantagenet Strongbow, an
English adventurer, hopes to one day create a homeland
shared in peace by Muslims, Jews, and Christians. That
he never accomplishes this goal, that he descends into
the irony of running guns between different groups,
always still hoping for the peace that becomes more
distant with each new mission, is one of the book's
saddest statements about the Middle East.
The discovery of "the oldest Bible in the world"
that "denies every religious truth ever held by
anyone" in the first book of the Quartet, Sinai
Tapestry, is yet another of Whittemore's statements.
When I say "statement," I don't mean in any
didactic sense - Whittemore's books are anything but
didactic. Instead, he gets his point across with such
extended absurdities as a bible created by a madman
or through the actions of characters whose ideals become
diluted through time, experience, and disappointment.
In this sense, Sinai Tapestry could be termed the most
hopeful of the novels, the most like an eccentric adventure
or journey, at least at the beginning. It follows the
exploits of Plantogenet Strongbow, "an English-born
adventurer who becomes a Muslim holy man and finally,
on the eve of World War I, the secret ruler of the Ottoman
Empire." In this pre-World War I milieu, Whittemore
seems to say that there exists more hope of an individual's
actions leading to substantial results. That Strongbow's
son Stern may fail in his goals does not seem assured.
There is also the wonderful sense of humor Whittemore
brings to Sinai Tapestry (as well as Jerusalem Poker
and, to a lesser extent, the last two novels of the
Quartet). Among Strongbow's exploits is his documentation,
in 23 volumes, of Levantine sex:
Strongbow's study was the most exhaustive sexual exploration
ever made. Without hesitations or allusions, with nothing
in fact to calm the reader, he thoughtfully examined
every sexual act that had ever taken place from Timbuktu
to the Hindu Kush, from the slums of Damascus to the
palaces of Baghdad, and in all the shifting Bedouin
encampments along the way
All claims were substantiated
at once. The evidence throughout was balanced in the
Victorian manner. Yet the facts were still implacable,
the sense and nonsense inescapable, the conclusions
terminal.
However, despite these touches, Sinai Tapestry ends
with the brutal intrusion of history. Some scenes, such
as Whittemore's portrayal of the bloody genocide at
Smyrna in 1922, shock as much as anything in literature.
If the final two
volumes of the Quartet are more subdued and more thoughtful,
then it may be due to the change in the time of the
setting. Nile Shadows takes place mostly in 1942, in
an Egypt threatened by Rommel, while Jericho Mosaic
details the life and exploits of a deep cover agent
between 1959 and the late 1970s. As the novels progress
toward the present, they begin to take on more "reality" and shake off the veneer, the exotic gloss, of the earlier
novels. In a sense, this makes them of less interest
to fantasy readers, but I find it unlikely that anyone
who has read Sinai Tapestry and Jerusalem Poker will
be able to resist them.8
Further, the changes in Whittemore's work mean that
in an odd way the books encompass the entire literary
spectrum, from the fantastical to the realistic, while
retaining their intra-book cohesion.
Nile Shadows may be the most dialogue-rich of Whittemore's
novels, but it also has the most explosive opening pages.
After a grenade is lobbed into a Cairo bar, British
agents must investigate the identity and purpose of
the only man killed by the explosion. The depiction
of the initial intelligence gathering, and the event
itself, is breathless and has the effect of a 360-degree
camera sweep in a movie, with shifting points of view.
As Publishers Weekly noted, Nile Shadows is "one
of the most complex and ambitious espionage stories
ever written
[that] plunges the reader into a hall-of-mirrors
world."
In Jericho Mosaic,
the world-spanning perspective becomes reduced in scope
to that of a double agent active during the many Arab-Jewish
conflicts. Whittemore's CIA experience is even more
palpable in this book as we are initiated into the rituals
and the dangers of such work. Others have said it before,
but there's no harm in repetition: This may be the most
haunting portrait of a spy in the history of literature.
Every nuance, every description feels ultra-real. Of
all the books, Jericho Mosaic, despite the discussions
of three mystical men in a Jericho garden, has the least
magic realism element. I have the sense, re-reading
the Quartet, that the books were a kind of progression
from the deep waters of a well, up into the light, with
Jericho Mosaic the most personal book, from Whittemore's
perspective.9
That he was finished writing about the Middle East is
not certain, but he planned to set his next, unpublished
novel in the United States.10
*
* *
I
remember that after I read Jerusalem Poker, I used to
imagine Edward Whittemore sitting in a café in
the holy city, working on his next novel. It did not
occur to me, given the authority displayed by the text,
that he lived anywhere but Jerusalem. I imagined that
he was much like one of his characters - setting down
his thoughts in fiction form after having first led
a life of great adventure.11
Some writers conjure such adventures out of a vivid
inner life, but in Whittemore's case, I was convinced
that he must have experienced, on some level, what he
wrote about. Such is the way that a favorite book can
convince us.
While it is difficult to tell you exactly how influential
Whittemore has been on my work, or on me personally,
I can tell you that I wrote three-fourths of a novel
set in South America that attempted to replicate Whittemore's
brand of decade-spanning fiction.12 I can also tell you that I still find myself, at some
level, grasping for superlatives like "amazing"
or "mind-bending" even while realizing that
these words have been devalued by a glut of book reviews
over decades.
In the end, all I can tell you is this: If you believe
in fiction much as you would a religion, or if you think
that great works of fiction contain insights and wisdom
that can literally change your life, or if you have
known books that took you on strange but wonderful journeys,
then you should read Edward Whittemore. He will not
disappoint you.
Footnotes:
1 If I ignore Quin's Shanghai Circus
in this article, it is only due to limitations of space
and focus. Quin's Shanghai Circus is a stunning short
novel, filled with indelible scenes of Shanghai during
wartime, and featuring characters that you will rarely
encounter again, in life or on the printed page.
2 I don't want this article to be
about the man rather than the books, but I should point
out that the Tom Wallace's introduction and Judy Karasik
afterword (available in all five of Old Earth's reprints)
present remarkably personal accounts of Whittemore as
a person and as a writer. Tom Wallace was Whittemore's
editor at Henry Holt and W.W. Norton, where the novels
were first published between 1974 and 1987. Wallace
subsequently became Whittemore's literary agent, and
then his literary executor. Judy Karasik edited the
last two novels of the Jerusalem Quartet.
3 "Cross-genre" is preferable
to me as a term to "slipstream." Slipstream
means nothing. It is nothing. The authors on the "slipstream" list would stare blankly at the word if shown it on
a page.
4 Perhaps writers felt something similar
during the New Wave, perhaps not.
5 Again, not to mention the New Wave,
although the New Wave was often formally experimental.
6 Despite rumors to the contrary,
fueled by reviewer comparisons, Whittemore does not
write like Pynchon - his themes sometimes dovetail with
Pynchon's, but as a stylist, Pynchon and Whittemore
are worlds apart.
If, like me, you had difficulty with Gravity's Rainbow,
you will have no such difficulty with Whittemore. This
is not to suggest that Whittemore is a lesser stylist
than Pynchon, just that such experimentation and floridness
did not interest him. As a storyteller on a grand scale,
he clearly did not want the narrative obscured by the
way in which he told a tale. Ironically enough, Anthony
Heilbut, wrote in The Nation when reviewing Sinai Tapestry,
that "Whittemore is a deceptively lucid stylist.
Were his syntax as cluttered as Pynchon's or as grand
as Nabokov's... his virtually ignored recent novel might
have received the attention it deserves, for his imagination
of present and alternative worlds is comparable to theirs..." Could it be that Whittemore's deceptive lucidity has
caused his obscurity up to now? It is certainly an interesting
theory, and there's some merit in it, but it is more
likely that Whittemore simply suffered from bad timing
or bad luck.
7 That Whittemore's books can simultaneously
be called "fantasies" and "espionage" novels may explain why his work, with its clear, unobtrusive
style, has been so difficult for some reviewers to categorize.
Such categorization is anathema to work like Whittemore's,
but it does help sell books.
8 However, because of their lack of
a fantastical element, relative to the first two books,
my examination of the final two books is cursory in
this review.
9 It is always a mistake to presume
to know the author's mind, of course; nonetheless, mistakes
can be interesting.
10 According to an informed source,
this novel may be published sometime in the next few
years.
11 Given the classified nature of
his position in the CIA, we may never know just how
much excitement Whittemore experienced first-hand.
12 And, in all candor, I stole a
Whittemore technique by which he describes carnage perpetrated
in Shanghai (from Quin's Shanghai Circus) for a similar
scene in my novella "Dradin, In Love".
In slightly different
form, three paragraphs of this article appeared in The
Council for Literature of the Fantastic Newsletter (1995),
edited by Dan Pearlman.
Jeff VanderMeer's upcoming books include Veniss Underground,
out in April 2003, and the co-edited The Thackery T.
Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited
Diseases (July 2003). In February of next year, he will
teach workshops at the Suncoast Writers' Festival in
St. Petersburg, Florida, along with such writers as
Salman Rushdie and Li-Young Lee.
This
review was first published on Locus
Online 11 November 2002
© Jeff VanderMeer 2002
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