Lipton’s Journal/December 29, 1954/94

The spy (another adventurer).^[1] The spy loves each half of his double life, and obviously could not live nearly as well without each necessary half. My love of opposites leads me to suspect that the side among which he masquerades is usually more real to him, more loved, than the side he is nominally working for.

Note

↑ Mailer’s fascination with spies and counter-intelligence reached its apex in 1991 with the publication of Harlot’s Ghost (1991), a novelistic depiction of the history of the CIA from the end of WWII to the death of President Kennedy. He claimed, and believed, that some of his furtive extra-marital romantic entanglements in the 1980s while he was writing the novel gave him psychological purchase on the double life of spies.

[1] Mailer’s fascination with spies and counter-intelligence reached its apex in 1991 with the publication of Harlot’s Ghost (1991), a novelistic depiction of the history of the CIA from the end of WWII to the death of President Kennedy. He claimed, and believed, that some of his furtive extra-marital romantic entanglements in the 1980s while he was writing the novel gave him psychological purchase on the double life of spies.

[1]