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Soviet citizens in pursuit of material for Oswald’s Tale. I should add here that Mailer had a built in, so to speak, predisposition to visit Russia, since as J.

Michael Lennon, Mailer’s authorized biographer, has pointed out to me, all

four of his grandparents were from there. Mailer wrote an interesting article for the Times of London about the first trip in which he questions Ronald Reagan’s famous declaration that the Soviet Union was “an evil empire” and also makes a plea for a more nuanced and mature relationship on the part of the US with the USSR. In addition to some perceptive observations on the life of the USSR at that time and comparisons with the US, Mailer writes,

<blockqoute>American leaders are invariably ready to accept fascism in other

countries and do business with it. Since fascism is the foul disease of the rich when capitalism breaks down, so our leaders can understand it. Communism, however, terrifies the American rich. After all, it is the tyranny of the poor when society breaks up altogether ...It is significant that we have forgiven Nazi Germany for its concentration camps and the million people the Nazis exterminated. We do great business with Germany, but we still do not exculpate the Russians for their gulags.</blockquote>

One could certainly debate Mailer’s conclusions, the sort of sweeping, summative analysis he was fond of making on the large questions of politics and life, but that is not the object here. My point is that forty-four years after the publication of ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'', for all of the differences in the

contexts and the details, Mailer is using the F-ism to test and partially justify the C-ism in a way that is not unlike Hemingway’s approach to the same question. And like Hemingway, Mailer comes down on the side of the now former Reds partly because they are not fascists.

We can say former Reds now not just because there is no longer a Soviet Union, but also because in Russia the word itself has long since lost the edge it possessed in the early years of the establishment of the Soviet state. Of course, the word remains in such terms as the Red Army, but there it is in a vestigial role, not the provocative one it once had. Similarly, by the time Mailer began visiting the Soviet Union the energy of the 1930s, its frenzied “socialist building" had flowed over the dams of all those hydroelectric plants, flown up through the stacks of all the steel mills, and become frozen in the gray cement of the resulting Soviet concrete colossus. During Harry

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Hubbard’s visits to Moscow in Harlot’s Ghost, Oswald’s strange stay in the USSR chronicled in Oswald’s Tale, and Mailer’s own visit just mentioned, the overall impression one gets is that of hum-drum routine. The human energy that was voluntarily and forcibly put into the building of the new state’s infrastructure was long since spent. I say forcibly because prisoners of the Gulag were used as laborers on many major and minor projects, including the building of the Moscow Metro, the extensive system of waterways linking Moscow with Leningrad-Petersburg, and the Belomor (White Sea) Canal. The romance associated with the Soviet intervention in Spain, amplified by cultural visits such as the one made by a Basque soccer team in 1937, was also long gone. Even if in the mid 1980s the Soviet Union was still a police state, Stalin’s terror of the 1930s was over as well, and dissidents were, as Mailer wrote in 1984 “ostracized . . . but no longer pulled out of their beds at three in the morning”( ).By the mid 1980s, a Soviet version of the middle class had long since formed (at least in the cities) that provided its citizens a stable and predictable way of life. When Hubbard visits the Metropol

Hotel in Moscow with “aged parquet that buckled like cheap linoleum when you stepped on it” (Harlot’s, 99), he cannot believe that this is the place where

the Bolsheviks gathered before and after the Revolution. “I was furious suddenly at I knew not what. How did these people presume to be our greatest enemy on earth? They did not even have the wherewithal to be evil”( ).

Hubbard shortly backs away from this apparently definitive repost to the Reagan doctrine when he reflects that “Communism might well be evil. That is an awesome and terrible thesis, but then the simple can reign over the complex”( ).Even the statue of fearsome Felix Dzerzhinsky in Lyubanka Square and the Lyubanka prison itself fail to “stir adrenaline” in Hubbard, who knows he might wind up there ( ). When he walks out onto Red Square, whose ancient name means Beautiful Square in Russian, Hubbard is struck by his impression that “[e]ven the young had an air of relinquishment that speaks of middle age”( ).

Throughout Harlot’s Ghost Mailer describes how the CIA and the KGB engaged in competition with each other in both Latin America, especially Uruguay, and in Berlin. (Mailer also describes the CIA’s and Hubbard’s activities in “Red” Cuba that led to the Bay of Pigs fiasco.) Even with the understanding that over all of this hung the possibility of some overzealous fool on either side making a fatal blunder that could have led to a nuclear exchange, I hope that we have now reached a time when we can look

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back and say, as I believe Mailer shows us, that all of the hugger-mugger, derring-do, tunnel digging, and various forms of cat and mouse the CIA and KGB engaged in were just so much silliness. We do so of course in the full recognition that much of this nonsense still goes on in the post-Soviet present.

At the end of ''Harlot’s Ghost'', Hubbard, using a fake passport, makes a second visit to Moscow to see whether Harlot has defected from the CIA to the KGB and there by become an American version of the British spy Kim Philby. If this were found to be the case, it would of course be an enormous defeat and embarrassment for the CIA and a personal trauma for Hubbard as well, since Harlot was variously his surrogate father, mentor, and rival in romance. Here Hubbard’s rage at the Soviet Union is in full cry when in contemplation of the bad coffee he will drink in the Metropol, he exclaims that it is an “[a]ccursed country of whole incapacities!” What I take from ''Harlot’s Ghost'' is that on one hand the US-USSR rivalry is still a good platform for the sort of mystery Mailer is creating in the novel, especially with regard to the fate of Harlot himself that is left unresolved. On the other hand, the middle-aged, middle-class Soviets are no longer really Red anymore, and the system they have created, however formidable militarily, is rent with glaring faults and failures, many of which are in plain sight for all to see.

In Mailer’s description of the pre-revolutionary period in Russia in The Castle in the Forest there is virtually no mention of the Bolsheviks and other revolutionaries, for his interest is all in Nicholas, Alexandra, Rasputin, and

his narrator Dieter’s professed manipulations of events. Had Mailer finished the future Russian project he forecasts in Castle; he would certainly have dealt with the Reds. My own hunch is that he could not have resisted the temptation to give his own characterization of Lenin. Leaving aside such moot points, I find that Mailer, for all of his attention to politics on a national level, is greatly more interested in the inner workings of the personalities of his characters than in their politics.

And the same may be said of Hemingway, who largely on account of his time at the Hotel Gaylord in Madrid, where he met with a number of Soviet participants in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side, was exceptionally well informed about what was going on in the Soviet Union of the late 1930s. He knew about the purges, especially of the Red Army’s officer corps, including that of Tukachevsky. He also knew buzz words and phrases, such as “liquidated” and “enemy of the people,” and he knew about political

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commissars. I am not claiming that his Soviet sources revealed to Hemingway everything they knew about the darker sides of Soviet life, particularly Stalin’s terror, for they would have been unlikely to risk being found out as Hemingway’s source of such information since he was known to them as a famous writer and journalist. However, Hemingway, one way or another did crack some of the Soviets’ seamier secrets, as we see in Robert Jordan’s ruminations on the fate of the Russian poet Mayakovsky who, according to Jordan, was guilty of the sin of Bohemianism, but now that he is dead, he is a “saint” (Hemingway). I understand this to mean that Hemingway was concerned about the fates of Soviet Russian writers and that Jordan’s irony shows that he understood they were subject to the vagaries of the state’s ever shifting attitudes toward them. I have to say here parenthetically that among the writers of his time Mayakovsky was certainly the reddest of them all, and his leftist proclivities outlasted even those of the regime itself. For all of Robert Jordan’s political awareness and involvement, he is no party’s man, and ultimately, we judge him not on his politics but on his character. Likewise, I believe that we should judge Hemingway by the character of his prose and not his politics.

It seems clear that the red connections of Hemingway and Mailer are sometimes linked with their interest in things Russian and sometimes not.

Moreover, both writers are bound up with Russian literature in a number of substantial, one might even say formative ways. To put it briefly, Hemingway

was clearly well read in Chekhov and he also read authors of the Soviet period. As Clarence Brown points out, Hemingway’s praise of Andrei Platonov to Soviet journalists helped spur the Soviets to resume publication of this writer of exceptional and original talent. It was during the 1960s that Hemingway experienced a surge of popularity among Russian readers. Indeed, I remember vividly a young man I met in Kiev in 1969 who had literally read all of Hemingway that was available in Russian translation at that time and who knew by heart the plots of many of his stories and novels. There is not space here adequately to describe what voracious readers of fiction Russians are except to say that they—from professional intellectuals to professional bus drivers—often know well not just the “classics” of their own literature but those of world literature, including of course Hemingway. Furthermore, some of the Russian writers who are often associated with a loose grouping from the 1960s called “Young Prose,” for example Yury Kazakov, show the unmistakable hand of Hemingway in their manner of writing. So

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we see that the relations between Hemingway and Russian writers form a two-way street.

I have made a case for what I consider to be Norman Mailer’s seminal relationship with Russian literature in the 2009 edition of ''The Mailer Review''(–), and some of his best-known works, such as ''An American Dream'', have been translated into Russian. A more thorough investigation of his reception in Russia, however, remains to be done.

@@ Line 95: / Line 95: @@
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+Soviet citizens in pursuit of material for Oswald’s Tale. I should add here that Mailer had a built in, so to speak, predisposition to visit Russia, since as J.
+Michael Lennon, Mailer’s authorized biographer, has pointed out to me, all
+four of his grandparents were from there. Mailer wrote an interesting article for the Times of London about the first trip in which he questions Ronald Reagan’s famous declaration that the Soviet Union was “an evil empire” and also makes a plea for a more nuanced and mature relationship on the part of the US with the USSR. In addition to some perceptive observations on the life of the USSR at that time and comparisons with the US, Mailer writes,
+<blockqoute>American leaders are invariably ready to accept fascism in other
+countries and do business with it. Since fascism is the foul disease of the rich when capitalism breaks down, so our leaders can understand it. Communism, however, terrifies the American rich. After all, it is the tyranny of the poor when society breaks up altogether ...It is significant that we have forgiven Nazi Germany for its concentration camps and the million people the Nazis exterminated. We do great business with Germany, but we still do not exculpate the Russians for their gulags.</blockquote>
+One could certainly debate Mailer’s conclusions, the sort of sweeping, summative analysis he was fond of making on the large questions of politics and life, but that is not the object here. My point is that forty-four years after the publication of ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'', for all of the differences in the
+contexts and the details, Mailer is using the F-ism to test and partially justify the C-ism in a way that is not unlike Hemingway’s approach to the same question. And like Hemingway, Mailer comes down on the side of the now former Reds partly because they are not fascists.
+We can say former Reds now not just because there is no longer a Soviet Union, but also because in Russia the word itself has long since lost the edge it possessed in the early years of the establishment of the Soviet state. Of course, the word remains in such terms as the Red Army, but there it is in a vestigial role, not the provocative one it once had. Similarly, by the time Mailer began visiting the Soviet Union the energy of the 1930s, its frenzied “socialist building" had flowed over the dams of all those hydroelectric plants, flown up through the stacks of all the steel mills, and become frozen in the gray cement of the resulting Soviet concrete colossus. During Harry
+Page break
+Hubbard’s visits to Moscow in Harlot’s Ghost, Oswald’s strange stay in the USSR chronicled in Oswald’s Tale, and Mailer’s own visit just mentioned, the overall impression one gets is that of hum-drum routine. The human energy that was voluntarily and forcibly put into the building of the new state’s infrastructure was long since spent. I say forcibly because prisoners of the Gulag were used as laborers on many major and minor projects, including the building of the Moscow Metro, the extensive system of waterways linking Moscow with Leningrad-Petersburg, and the Belomor (White Sea) Canal. The romance associated with the Soviet intervention in Spain, amplified by cultural visits such as the one made by a Basque soccer team in 1937, was also long gone. Even if in the mid 1980s the Soviet Union was still a police state, Stalin’s terror of the 1930s was over as well, and dissidents were, as Mailer wrote in 1984 “ostracized . . . but no longer pulled out of their beds at three in the morning”( ).By the mid 1980s, a Soviet version of the middle class had long since formed (at least in the cities) that provided its citizens a stable and predictable way of life. When Hubbard visits the Metropol
+Hotel in Moscow with “aged parquet that buckled like cheap linoleum when you stepped on it” (Harlot’s, 99), he cannot believe that this is the place where
+the Bolsheviks gathered before and after the Revolution. “I was furious suddenly at I knew not what. How did these people presume to be our greatest enemy on earth? They did not even have the wherewithal to be evil”( ).
+Hubbard shortly backs away from this apparently definitive repost to the Reagan doctrine when he reflects that “Communism might well be evil. That is an awesome and terrible thesis, but then the simple can reign over the complex”( ).Even the statue of fearsome Felix Dzerzhinsky in Lyubanka Square and the Lyubanka prison itself fail to “stir adrenaline” in Hubbard, who knows he might wind up there ( ). When he walks out onto Red Square, whose ancient name means Beautiful Square in Russian, Hubbard is struck by his impression that “[e]ven the young had an air of relinquishment that speaks of middle age”( ).
+Throughout Harlot’s Ghost Mailer describes how the CIA and the KGB engaged in competition with each other in both Latin America, especially Uruguay, and in Berlin. (Mailer also describes the CIA’s and Hubbard’s activities in “Red” Cuba that led to the Bay of Pigs fiasco.) Even with the understanding that over all of this hung the possibility of some overzealous fool on either side making a fatal blunder that could have led to a nuclear exchange, I hope that we have now reached a time when we can look
+Page break
+back and say, as I believe Mailer shows us, that all of the hugger-mugger, derring-do, tunnel digging, and various forms of cat and mouse the CIA and KGB engaged in were just so much silliness. We do so of course in the full recognition that much of this nonsense still goes on in the post-Soviet present.
+At the end of ''Harlot’s Ghost'', Hubbard, using a fake passport, makes a second visit to Moscow to see whether Harlot has defected from the CIA to the KGB and there by become an American version of the British spy Kim Philby. If this were found to be the case, it would of course be an enormous defeat and embarrassment for the CIA and a personal trauma for Hubbard as well, since Harlot was variously his surrogate father, mentor, and rival in romance. Here Hubbard’s rage at the Soviet Union is in full cry when in contemplation of the bad coffee he will drink in the Metropol, he exclaims that it is an “[a]ccursed country of whole incapacities!” What I take from ''Harlot’s Ghost'' is that on one hand the US-USSR rivalry is still a good platform for the sort of mystery Mailer is creating in the novel, especially with regard to the fate of Harlot himself that is left unresolved. On the other hand, the middle-aged, middle-class Soviets are no longer really Red anymore, and the system they have created, however formidable militarily, is rent with glaring faults and failures, many of which are in plain sight for all to see.
+In Mailer’s description of the pre-revolutionary period in Russia in The Castle in the Forest there is virtually no mention of the Bolsheviks and other revolutionaries, for his interest is all in Nicholas, Alexandra, Rasputin, and
+his narrator Dieter’s professed manipulations of events. Had Mailer finished the future Russian project he forecasts in Castle; he would certainly have dealt with the Reds. My own hunch is that he could not have resisted the temptation to give his own characterization of Lenin. Leaving aside such moot points, I find that Mailer, for all of his attention to politics on a national level, is greatly more interested in the inner workings of the personalities of his characters than in their politics.
+And the same may be said of Hemingway, who largely on account of his time at the Hotel Gaylord in Madrid, where he met with a number of Soviet participants in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side, was exceptionally well informed about what was going on in the Soviet Union of the late 1930s. He knew about the purges, especially of the Red Army’s officer corps, including that of Tukachevsky. He also knew buzz words and phrases, such as “liquidated” and “enemy of the people,” and he knew about political
+Page Break
+commissars. I am not claiming that his Soviet sources revealed to Hemingway everything they knew about the darker sides of Soviet life, particularly Stalin’s terror, for they would have been unlikely to risk being found out as Hemingway’s source of such information since he was known to them as a famous writer and journalist. However, Hemingway, one way or another did crack some of the Soviets’ seamier secrets, as we see in Robert Jordan’s ruminations on the fate of the Russian poet Mayakovsky who, according to Jordan, was guilty of the sin of Bohemianism, but now that he is dead, he is a “saint” (Hemingway). I understand this to mean that Hemingway was concerned about the fates of Soviet Russian writers and that Jordan’s irony shows that he understood they were subject to the vagaries of the state’s ever shifting attitudes toward them. I have to say here parenthetically that among the writers of his time Mayakovsky was certainly the reddest of them all, and his leftist proclivities outlasted even those of the regime itself. For all of Robert Jordan’s political awareness and involvement, he is no party’s man, and ultimately, we judge him not on his politics but on his character. Likewise, I believe that we should judge Hemingway by the character of his prose and not his politics.
+It seems clear that the red connections of Hemingway and Mailer are sometimes linked with their interest in things Russian and sometimes not.
+Moreover, both writers are bound up with Russian literature in a number of substantial, one might even say formative ways. To put it briefly, Hemingway
+was clearly well read in Chekhov and he also read authors of the Soviet period. As Clarence Brown points out, Hemingway’s praise of Andrei Platonov to Soviet journalists helped spur the Soviets to resume publication of this writer of exceptional and original talent. It was during the 1960s that Hemingway experienced a surge of popularity among Russian readers. Indeed, I remember vividly a young man I met in Kiev in 1969 who had literally read all of Hemingway that was available in Russian translation at that time and who knew by heart the plots of many of his stories and novels. There is not space here adequately to describe what voracious readers of fiction Russians are except to say that they—from professional intellectuals to professional bus drivers—often know well not just the “classics” of their own literature but those of world literature, including of course Hemingway. Furthermore, some of the Russian writers who are often associated with a loose grouping from the 1960s called “Young Prose,” for example Yury Kazakov, show the unmistakable hand of Hemingway in their manner of writing. So
+Page break
+we see that the relations between Hemingway and Russian writers form a two-way street.
+I have made a case for what I consider to be Norman Mailer’s seminal relationship with Russian literature in the 2009 edition of ''The Mailer Review''(–), and some of his best-known works, such as ''An American Dream'', have been translated into Russian. A more thorough investigation of his reception in Russia, however, remains to be done.