The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Examining Mailer in a Time of Split-focus — or, What the Internet Cannot Do for Us: Difference between revisions

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 For all of Mailer’s routine protestations about being a novelist first, last and always, even when working in nonfiction (and this despite having been hailed as a founder of the New Journalism of the fifties and sixties), he proceeds here as would any reporter worth his or her salt: He effectively jams a wrench into the gearwheels of what my friend David Halberstam used to call the bullshit machine to suspend the churning of factoids so he can reframe the old questions. He asks not so much what Lee Harvey Oswald did or didn’t do as what ''kind'' of man was he? Was he capable of killing JFK or, put in Mailer’s more interesting way, was he constitutionally ''incapable'' of sharing the limelight as a member of a murderous conspiracy? “Before we can understand a murderer—if he is one—we must discover his motive,” Mailer tells us. “But to find the motive, we do well to encounter the man.”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=350}} Mailer says his goal is psychological truth and we believe him—but what he is really after, it seems to me, is to help us penetrate that tangled thicket where personal psychology encounters the pivotal political event.
+Mailer divides his book into two internal volumes, the first and liveliest of which examines the details of Oswald’s life in Moscow and Minsk, where he lived in a sort of quasi-defector’s limbo from October 1959 to June 1962, and where three decades later Mailer, his colleague Lawrence Schiller, and a translator, Ludmilla Peresvetova, spent six months conducting interviews. Good timing brings good luck: The collapse of the Soviet police state in 1991 had freed sources to speak their minds. In Minsk, the Belarus KGB opened its Oswald files—“the equivalent,” says Mailer, “of an Oklahoma land-grab for an author to be able to move into a large and hitherto unrecorded part of Oswald’s life.”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=349}} And it is through Mailer’s robust triangulation of such materials (the in-depth interviews, documents new and old, Oswald’s “Historic Diary” and letters, private and official) that Oswald’s ghost enters the Russian landscape in its callow form. Our first impression is of a milquetoast, eager-to-please nineteen-year-old—a mother-haunted ex-Marine who keeps his shoes shined, his hair combed, and who strikes Rimma, his Intourist guide, as flabbergastingly clueless about the communist doctrine that has supposedly inspired Oswald to throw in his lot with Russia in a period of maximum Cold War tension. After a month in country, Oswald tells American reporter Priscilla Johnson McMillan about his one excellent solo adventure outside his Moscow hotel. “He had walked four blocks to Detsky Mir, the children’s department store,” quotes Mailer, in an ''aperçu'' from Johnson’s 1977 biography of Oswald, “and bought an ice cream cone. . . . Here he was, coming to live in this country forever, and he had so far dared venture into only four blocks of it.”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=61}}
+But Oswald is not your typical mama’s boy abroad. When authorities deny him permission to stay in Russia, he does screech at his diary: “I am shocked! My dreams! . . . I have waited for two years to be accepted. My fondest dreams are shattered!”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=51}} Yet instead of buckling, Oswald bucks the Orwellian system, staging a phony suicide attempt. The scam works: The Soviet state permits him to settle in the Workers’ Paradise, and Mailer uses the event to set the hook. There is just something about this Oswald kid, his talent for lying and manipulation in particular, we now want to explore. And it is Mailer’s manner of patient observation, “the small revelation of separate points of view,”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=197}} that provides a prime lesson in the importance of building writerly context in a way that thoroughly pays off readerly curiosity. In reopening a story afflicted by snap judgments not infrequently decoupled from motivation, Mailer places Oswald in a kind of suspended animation to examine his thoughts and actions as a kinesiologist might break down video footage to analyze the movements of a track athlete jumping hurdles.
+The frames tick by: Sent to work in a radio factory in Minsk, our eligible bachelor, whom the propaganda-conscious state has glamorized with a solid salary and a snug (by Soviet standards) apartment, is as popular with the ladies as he is resented by coworkers for his ornery indolence. Meanwhile KGB surveillance catches Oswald cheating on his bus fare. And thus as Mailer expertly layers in the details, the sense of personal duplicity that Oswald seems to inspire in others grows in us too. Stanislav Shushkevich, an old-school patriot who is assigned to help improve Oswald’s stumbling Russian, distrusts the American at first sight. “[N]o person could be worse than a traitor,” Mailer paraphrases Shushkevich as saying. “A man untrue to one side would always betray the other.”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=81}} Not unreasonably, local KGB officials want to know if Oswald, an ex-United States Marine trained in radar and electronic surveillance, is an American spy. They tail him, bug his apartment, chronicle operatic fights with his new wife, Marina Prusakova and coerce Russian friends to spy on him. But Oswald remains a slippery fish. After a year and half of its cloak-and-dagger best, the KGB finds “no evidence that he was an active agent of any intelligence service.”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=252}} And the lapidary context Mailer has hauled forward to this point makes his conjecture ring true: If Oswald is a CIA sleeper agent, he’s ''extremely'' good at it for someone so young, petulant and bone-lazy. If, on the other hand, he is a loyal Marxist, he has a funny way of showing it:
+{{quote|We ought to know Oswald well enough by now to understand how demoralized he was by working in a radio factory. To labor collectively was the essence of anonymity. The finished product had more importance than his own person. He had not voyaged from the Marine Corps to the Soviet Union in order to become anonymous. If to work with no enthusiasm would attract more attention, then, indeed, he would put his feet on the table. . . . [H]e dramatizes his presence by going to sleep.{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=408}} }}
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