EDWARD WHITTEMORE
(1933-1995) ~ FOREWORD BY TOM WALLACE
"SOME
TWENTY YEARS AFTER the end of the war with Japan a freighter
arrived in Brooklyn with the largest collection of Japanese
pornography ever assembled in a Western tongue. The owner
of the collection, a huge, smiling fat man named Geraty, presented
a passport to customs officials that showed that he was a
native-born American about as old as the century, an exile
who had left the United States four decades before."
Thus
begins Quin's Shanghai Circus; it ends with
the largest funeral procession held in Asia since the thirteenth
century:
The year was 1974, the author of Quin's Shanghai Circus
Edward Whittemore, a forty-one-year-old former American intelligence
agent; he and I had been undergraduates at Yale back in the
1950s, but then we had gone our separate ways, he to the Marines
and then the CIA and I to a career in book publishing in New
York City. Needless to say, I was pleased that my old Yale
friend had brought his novel to me and the publishing house
of Holt, Rinehart and Winston where I was editor-in-chief
of the Trade Department. I was even more delighted when the
reviews, mostly favorable, started coming in, capped by Jerome
Charyn in The New York Times Book Review: "Quin
was a profoundly nutty book full of mysteries, truths, untruths,
idiot savants, necrophiliacs, magicians, dwarfs, circus masters,
secret agents
a marvelous recasting of history in our
century."
In the next fifteen years Whittemore went on to write four
more wildly imaginative novels, his Jerusalem Quartet: Sinai
Tapestry, Jerusalem Poker, Nile Shadows, and Jericho
Mosaic. Reviewers and critics compared his work to the
novels of Carlos Fuentes, Thomas Pynchon, and Kurt Vonnegut.
Publishers Weekly called him "our best unknown
novelist." Jim Hougan, writing in Harper's Magazine,
said Whittemore was "one of the last, best arguments
against television.
He is an author of extraordinary
talents.
The milieu is one in which readers of espionage
novels may think themselves familiar, and yet it is totally
transformed by the writer's wild humor, his mystical bent,
and his bicameral perception of time and history."
Edward Whittemore died from prostate cancer in the summer
of 1995 at the age of sixty-two, not much better known than
when he began his short, astonishing writing career in the
early 1970s. His novels never sold more than 5000 copies in
hard covers, three were briefly available in mass market paperback
editions. But the Quartet was published in Great Britain,
Holland, Spain, Italy, Greece, Scandinavia, Russia and Poland
and Germany where Whittemore was described on its jacket as
the "master American storyteller." The jacket on
the Polish edition of Quin's Shanghai Circus was a
marvelous example of Japanese erotica.
Whittemore graduated from Deering High School, Portland, Maine
in June 1951 and entered Yale that fall, a member of the Class
of 1955. Another Yale classmate, the novelist Ric Frede, labeled
Yale undergraduates of the 1950s "members of the Silent
Generation." The Fifties were also the "Eisenhower
Years," that comfortable period between the Second World
War and the radicalism and the campus unrest of the 1960s.
Ivy League universities were still dominated by the graduates
of New England prep schools. Sons of the East Coast "establishment,"
they were closer to the Princeton of F. Scott Fitzgerald and
the Harvard of John P. Marquand than the worlds of Jack Kerouac
and Allen Ginsberg. They were "gentlemen" and athletes
but not necessarily scholars. Often after receiving "gentlemanly
C's" at Yale and the other Ivys, they went on to careers
on Wall Street or in Washington; to the practice of law, medicine,
or journalism. They entertained their families and friends
on the playing fields of Yale as well as at Mory's. They ran The Yale Daily News, WYBC (the campus radio station),
The Yale Record (the humor magazine), The Yale Banner (the year book), and sang in various Yale music groups. They
were usually members of a fraternity and were "tapped" by one of the six secret Senior Societies.
By the Yale standards of the day, Whittemore was a great success,
a "high school boy" who made it. Affable, good-looking
and trim, he presented a quizzical smile to the world. He
casually wore the uniform that was "in": herringbone
tweed jacket, preferably with patches at the elbow, rep tie,
chinos and scruffy white buck shoes. In a word, he was "shoe"
(short for "white shoe," a term of social approval).
He was not much of an athlete, but he was a member of Zeta
Psi, a fraternity of hard-drinking, socially well-connected
undergraduates. At the end of Junior year he was tapped for
Scroll and Key.
But his real distinction was that he was the Managing Editor
of the 1955 Yale News Board at a time when News
chairmen and managing editors were as popular as football
team captains and the leading scholars of the class. During
the immediate postwar years and the 1950s the Yale News
produced such prominent writer-journalists as William F. Buckley,
James Claude Thomson, Richard Valeriani, David McCullough,
Roger Stone, M. Stanton Evans, Henry S.F. Cooper, Calvin Trillin,
Gerald Jonas, Harold Gulliver, Scott Sullivan, and Robert
Semple. They would make their mark at The New York Times,
The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, The National Review, Harper's,
and the television networks, and go on to write many books.
I met Ted early in the spring of Freshman year. We were both "heeling" the first News "comp,"
and as was usually the case with survivors of that fierce
"competition" to make the News, we remained
friends throughout our years at Yale. It was assumed by many
of us on the News that Ted would head for Wall Street
and Brown Brothers Harriman, a blue-chip investment firm where
Old Blues from Scroll and Key were more than welcome and where
Ted's older brother later was a Partner. Or at the very least,
he would get on the journalistic fast-track somewhere in the
Time-Life empire founded by an earlier News worthy,
Henry Luce.
But we were wrong. Whittemore, after a tour of duty as an
officer in the Marines in Japan, was approached there by the
CIA, , and spent the Kennedy years working for the Agency
in Europe. During those years Whittemore would periodically
return to New York City. "What are you up to?" one
would ask. "Oh, this and that." For a while he was
running a socialist newspaper in Rome. After he left the Agency
there was a stint with the Addiction Services Agency in New
York City. Later, there were rumors that he had a drinking
"problem" and that he was taking drugs. He married
and divorced twice. He and his first wife had two daughters.
And then there were the women he lived with after the second
divorce. There were many; they all seemed to be talented-painters,
photographers, writers, sculptors, and dancers.There were
more rumors. He was living on Crete, he had no job, no money,
he was writing. Then silence. Clearly, the "fair-haired" undergraduate had not gone on to fame and glory.
It was not until 1972 or 1973 that Ted surfaced in my life.
He was back in New York on a visit. On the surface he appeared
to be the old Ted. He was a little rumpled, but the wit, the
humor, the boyish charm were still there. Yet he seemed more
thoughtful, more reflective, and there was Carol, a woman
with whom Ted had become involved while in Crete and with
whom he seemed to be living. He was more secretive now. And
he had the manuscript of a novel he wanted me to read. I thought
the novel was wonderful, full of fabulous and exotic characters,
brimming with life, history, and the mysteries of the Orient.
The novel that came to be called Quin's Shanghai Circus
went through three more drafts before we published it in 1974.
Set in Japan and China before and during the Second World
War, two drafts even began in the South Bronx in the 1920s
and involved three young Irish brothers named Quin. By the
time the novel came out only one Quin remained and the Bronx
interlude had shrunk from eighty pages to a couple of paragraphs.
As mentioned, Quin was a bigger success with the critics
than it was in the bookstores. Readers loved the novel, even
though there were not nearly enough of them. But Whittemore
was not deterred. Less than two years later he appeared in
my office with an even more ambitious novel, Sinai Tapestry, the first volume of his Jerusalem Quartet. Set in the heyday
of the British Empire, it takes place in Palestine during
the middle of the nineteenth century. Foremost among the larger-than-life
characters were a tall English aristocrat, the greatest swordsman,
botanist, and explorer of Victorian England; a fanatical trappist
monk who found the original Sinai Bible, which "denies
every religious truth ever held by anyone;" and an Irish
radical who had fled to Palestine disguised as a nun. My favorite
was (and still is) Haj Harun, born three thousand years earlier,
an ethereal wanderer through history: now an antiquities dealer
dressed in a faded yellow cloak and sporting a Crusaders'
rusty helmet while pursuing his mission as defender of the
Holy City. He had several previous incarnations: as a stone
carver of winged lions during the Assyrian occupation, proprietor
of an all-night grocery store under the Greeks, a waiter when
the Romans were in power, and a distributor of hashish and
goats for the Turks. Before I first went to Israel in 1977,
Whittemore, who was then living in New York, gave me the names
of several people in Jerusalem. One was named Mohammed, the
owner of an antiquities gallery. When I finally tracked him
down in the Old City I saw before me a fey character who,
if he had been wearing a faded yellow cloak and a rusty helmet,
would have been a dead ringer for Haj Harun.
Clearly Ted had been caught up in a new life in Jerusalem.
During the preceding years when he had been living modestly
in Crete he had the opportunity to do a great deal of reading
and thinking. Crete had a rich history. It had been occupied
by the Romans, conquered by the Arabs, Byzantines, and Venetians
before becoming part of the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth
century. Now it was a quiet, out-of-the-way Greek Island with
few distractions for a penniless American expatriate. In other
words, a perfect place for a former intelligence agent to
take stock and decide what history was all about, to re-examine
what he had learned as a Yale undergraduate.
While in Japan in the 1960s Whittemore had written two unpublished
novels, one about the Japanese game of Go, the other about
a young American expatriate living in Tokyo. In Crete he began
to write again, slowly, awkwardly, experimenting with voice,
style, and subject matter, distilling his experience in the
Agency into that sweeping raucous epic, Quin's Shanghai
Circus. By the time he embarked on the Quartet, he was
more assured, he was a more polished writer, and he had found
a subject that was to engage him for the rest of his life:
Jerusalem and the world of Christians, Arabs and Jews; faith
and belief; mysticism and religious (and political) fanaticism;
nineteenth century; European imperialism, twentieth century
wars and terrorism. But above all Jerusalem, the City on the
Hill, the Holy City. The novels would still be full of outrageous
characters, the humor was still often grotesque and macabre,
and there was violence aplenty. But there was also a new understanding
of the mysteries of life.
The new novel, finally published in 1979, was Jerusalem
Poker, the second volume of the Quartet. It involves a
twelve-year poker game begun in the last days of December
1921 when three men sit down to play. The stakes were nothing
less than the Holy City itself. Where else could a game for
the control of Jerusalem be played but in the antiquities
shop of Haj Harun? Actually, Ted did not come to live permanently
(that is "permanently" according to his ways) in
Jerusalem until he was well into writing the Quartet. His
knowledge of Jerusalem was based initially on books, but later
on he wandered endlessly through the crowded, teeming streets
and Quarters of the Old City. Merchants of every kind, butchers,
tanners, glass blowers, jewelers, silversmiths, and even iron
mongers spoke nearly every known language and dressed in the
vibrant and exotic costumes of the Middle East. I once remarked
to Ted while we were making our way along a narrow passage
in the Arab Quarter, that I fully expected we would run into
Sinbad the Sailor coming the other way.
The next time I visited Jerusalem, Ted had settled down with
Helen, an American painter, in a spacious apartment in a large,
nineteenth-century stone building in the Ethiopian Church
compound. The apartment overlooked a courtyard full of flowers
and lemon trees. Over one wall there loomed a Cistercian convent,
and around the corner there was a synagogue full of Orthodox
rabbinical students praying twenty-four hours a-day, or so
it seemed to me. And standing or quietly reading in the courtyard
were the Ethiopian monks. One morning I woke at six in my
sunlit room and heard the Cistercian nuns singing a cappella.
They sounded like birds and I thought for a moment I was in
heaven.
After a midday nap we usually headed for the Old City, invariably
ending up in the same cafe, a pretentious name for what was
little more than an outdoor tea garden where hot tea and sticky
buns were served. The proprietor sat at one table interminably
fingering worry beads and talking to friends, an ever-changing
group of local merchants, money changers, students, and some
unsavory hard-looking types. They all seemed to have a nodding
acquaintance with Ted, who knew as much, if not more, about
the Old City as its inhabitants.
By 1981, Whittemore was living in a studio apartment on Third
Avenue in New York City. And he was writing steadily. I had
left Holt earlier that spring for another publishing house
and a young colleague Judy Karasik took over the editorial
work on Whittemore's new novel, Nile Shadows. After
Ted died she wrote the epilogue to this novel. It is one of
the most moving accounts of an editor's working and personal
relationship with an author I have ever read. She should have
given it as a eulogy at Whittemore's funeral twelve years
after Nile Shadows appeared.
Nile Shadows is set in Egypt, it is 1942 and Rommel's
powerful Afrika Corps is threatening to overrun Egypt and
seize control of the entire Middle East. A group of Whittemore's
characters, some old, some new, hold the fate of the world
in their hands. At the very beginning of the novel, Stern,
an idealistic visionary in Sinai Tapestry turned gun-runner
a half century later, is killed by a grenade thrown into the
doorway of a backstreet bar. Violence as well as mysticism
dominates Whittemore's novels. In Quin's Shanghai Circus he had described with horrible abandon the "rape" of Nanking and Sinai Tapestry the sack of Smyrna in
1922 when the Turks butchered ten of thousands of Greek men,
women, and children. A Publishers Weekly reviewer said of
Nile Shadows: "One of the most complex and ambitious
espionage stories ever written." And a critic in The
Nation said: "Whittemore is a deceptively lucid stylist.
Were his syntax as cluttered as Pynchon's or as conspicuously
grand as Nabokov's or Fuentes', his virtually ignored novels
might have received the attention they deserved."
But sales still hadn't caught up with the critics. By the
spring of 1985, Ted was finishing the novel that was to be
called Jericho Mosaic, the fourth of the Jerusalem
Quartet. I was in Israel for the biennial Jerusalem International
Book Fair. Afterwards, Ted suggested we drive down to Jericho,
that oasis to the southeast of Jerusalem from which most of
the caravans of Biblical times set out for the Levant, Asia
Minor, and Africa. On the way we visited several Greek Orthodox
monasteries in the Judean wilderness. Since they were built
into solid rock at the bottom of isolated ravines reachable
only on narrow paths, we had to leave the car up on the road
and scramble down hillsides more suitable for mountain goats
than a novelist and a New York editor. However, once we made
it safely to the bottom, the monks proved to be extremely
hospitable. Whittemore was a frequent visitor and the monks
seemed to enjoy his company.
After being shown around the rocky quarters, not much more
than elaborate caves, and consuming some dreadful retsina
(the monks didn't drink it themselves) we continued to Jericho
and a typical lunch of dried figs, a bread-like pastry and
melon and hot fragrant tea. Then we made our way to the Negev.
Over the years Ted had befriended some of the local Bedouins
and we were greeted like old friends at several encampments.
We spent one night at an Israeli meteorological center/desert
inn near a Nabatean ruin. There seemed to be antennae and
electric sensors everywhere, and as we used to say in those
days, gray men in London, Washington, Moscow, and Beijing
could probably hear every sparrow-fart in the desert. In retrospect,
I sometimes wonder if Ted had ever really retired? Was he
still, in this case, visiting his "controller," and using me as his cover?
Several months later, when Ted sent me a post card urging
me to save a spot on an upcoming list for his next novel,
the design on the card was a Byzantine mosaic of "the
Tree of Life" Ted and I had seen on the stone floor of
a ruin in Jericho. I took it to the art director at Norton
where I was then a senior editor. He agreed with me that it
would make an excellent design for a book jacket. All we needed
was a manuscript.
Jericho Mosaic arrived before the end of the year,
a fitting culmination to Whittemore's marvelous Quartet. In
my opinion, Jericho Mosaic is the most original espionage
story ever written. The novel is based on events that actually
took place before the Six Day War and Whittemore demonstrates
his total knowledge of the craft of intelligence and its practitioners,
his passion for the Middle East, his devotion to the Holy
City, and his commitment to peace and understanding among
Arabs, Jews, and Christians. The novel and the novelist maintain
we can overcome religious, philosophical, and political differences
if we are ready to commit ourselves to true understanding
for all people and all ideas.
This humanistic message is imbedded in a true story involving
Eli Cohen, a Syrian Jew who sacrificed his life (he managed
to turn over to Mossad the Syrian plans and maps for the defense
of the Golan Heights) in order that Israel might survive.
In the novel Whittemore tells the story of Halim (who is clearly
based on Eli Cohen) a Syrian Jew who returns to his homeland
from Buenos Aires where he has been pretending to be a Syrian
businessman to forward the Arab revolution. Halim becomes
an outspoken advocate for Palestinian rights, he is the conscience
of the Arab cause, "the incorruptible one." But
Halim is an agent for the Mossad; his code name is "the
Runner," his assignment to penetrate the heart of the
Syrian military establishment. At the same time the novel
is a profound meditation on the nature of faith in which an
Arab holy man, a Christian mystic, and a former British intelligence
officer sit in a garden in Jericho exploring religion and
humanity's relation in its various facets.
There were fewer reviews of Jericho Mosaic and even
fewer sales than before. Arabs and Jews were involved in a
bloody confrontation on the West Bank, there were lurid photographs
in the newspapers and magazines and on television every day,
and even more horrific stories. The times were not propitious
for novelists defending the eternal verities, no matter how
well they wrote. One critic did, however, proclaim Whittemore's
Quartet "the best metaphor for the intelligence business
in recent American fiction."
Shortly after Jericho Mosaic was published Whittemore
left Jerusalem, the Ethiopian compound, and the American painter.
He was back in New York living during the winter with Ann,
a woman he had met years before when her husband had been
teaching at Yale. In the summers he would take over the sprawling,
white, Victorian family home in Dorset, Vermont. The windows
had green shutters, and an acre of lawn in front of the house
was bounded by immense stately evergreen trees. Twenty or
so rooms were distributed around the house in some arbitrary
New England Victorian design, and the furniture dated back
to his grandparents, if not great-grandparents. Ted's brothers
and sisters by now had their own houses and so Ted was pretty
much its sole occupant. It was not winterized and could only
be inhabited from May through October. But for Ted it was
a haven to which he could retreat and write.
In the spring of 1987 I became a literary agent and Ted joined
me as a client. American book publishing was gradually being
taken over by international conglomerates with corporate offices
in Germany and Great Britain. They were proving to be more
enamored of commerce than literature and it seemed to me I
could do more for writers by representing them to any of a
dozen publishers rather than just working for one.
I regularly visited Ted in the fall in Dorset. "The foliage
season," late September, early October, is a very special
time of year in New England: crisp clear days, wonderfully
cool moonlit nights. We walked the woods and fields of southern
Vermont by day, sat in front of the house after dinner on
solid green Adirondack chairs, drink in hand and smoking.
Actually I was the one drinking (usually brandy) because Ted
had stopped years ago. While we talked I would smoke a cigar
or two, Ted would merely smoke one evil-looking cheroot. Comfortably
ensconced on the lawn near the United Church, where his great-grandfather
had been a minister, within sight of the Village Green and
the Dorset Inn, our talk would turn to books and writing,
family and friends. To his family, Ted must have cut a romantic
figure, the Yalie who had gone off to the CIA, had, so to
speak, burned out, had come home via Crete, Jerusalem, and
New York as a peripatetic novelist whose books received glowing
reviews that resulted in less than glowing sales. But they,
and "his women," supported him and continued to
believe in him.
It was during these early fall visits that I discovered that
his Prentiss great-grandfather had been a Presbyterian minister
who had made his way up the Hudson River by boat from New
York to Troy and then over to Vermont by train and wagon in
the 1860s. In the library of the white, rambling Victorian
house in Dorset there were shelves of fading leather-bound
volumes of popular romances written by his great-grandmother
for shop girls, informing them how to improve themselves,
dress, and find suitable husbands. I gathered she was the
Danielle Steele of her day, and the family's modest wealth
was due to her literary efforts and not the generosity of
the church's congregation.
We talked about the new novel. It was to be called Sister
Sally and Billy the Kid and it was to be Ted's first American
novel. It was about an Italian in his twenties from the Chicago
of the roaring Twenties. His older brother, a gangster, had
helped him buy a flower shop. But there was a shoot-out, the
older brother was dead, and Billy has to flee to the West
Coast where he meets a faith healer not unlike Aimee Semple
McPherson. The real-life McPherson disappeared for a month
in 1926, and when she returned claimed she had been kidnapped.
The stone house in which Billy and his faith healer spend
their month of love (from the beginning it is clear that the
idyll must be limited to one month) has a walled garden behind
it full of lemon trees and singing birds. Although that house
is in southern California, the garden bears a close resemblance
to another garden in the Ethiopian compound in Jerusalem with
a synagogue on one side and a Cistercian convent on the other.
Then one day in early spring 1995, Ted called me. Could he
come by the office that morning? I assumed it was to deliver
the long-awaited manuscript. There had been two false starts
after Jericho Mosaic. Instead Ted told me he was dying.
Would I be his literary executor? A year or so earlier Ted
had been diagnosed as having prostate cancer. It was too far
along for an operation. His doctor had prescribed hormones
and other medication and the cancer had gone into remission.
But now it had spread. Less than six months later he was dead.
They were terrible months for him. However, during those last
weeks and days while he slipped in and out of consciousness,
he was looked after by Carol who had never really left his
life.
There was a hushed memorial service in the United Church in
Dorset that August. Afterwards, a reception was held on the
large lawn in front of the family house. It was there that
the disparate parts of Ted's world came together, perhaps
for the first time; there was his family, his two sisters
and two brothers and their spouses, nieces, and nephews with
their own families (but not Ted's former wives or the two
daughters who had flown to New York to say "goodbye");
there were neighbors, Yale friends, and a couple of colleagues
from the Lindsay years. Were there any "spooks"
in attendance? One really can't say, but there were eight
"spooks" of a different sort from Yale, members
of the 1955 Scroll and Key delegation. Ann and Carol were,
of course, there.
Jerusalem and Dorset. The beautiful Holy City on the rocky
cliffs overlooking the parched gray-brown desert. A city marked
by thousands of years of history, turbulent struggles between
great empires and three of the most enduring, vital religions
given by God to mankind. And the summer-green valley in Vermont
(covered by snow in the winter and by mud in the spring) where
Dorset nestles between the ridges of the softly rolling Green
Mountains. Once one of the cradles of the American Revolution
and American democracy, and later a thriving farming and small
manufacturing community, it is a place where time has stood
still since the beginning of the twentieth century. One was
the subject of Whittemore's dreams and books; the other the
peaceful retreat in which he dreamt and wrote the last summers
of his life.
Ted had finally come home to New England. It had been a long
journey: Portland, New Haven, Japan, Italy, New York, Crete,
Jerusalem, New York, and now Dorset. Along the way he had
many friends and companions; he was not a particularly good
husband or father and disappointed many. But gradually he
had found his voice, written his novels, and fallen in love
with Jerusalem. I would like to think that Ted died dreaming
of his Holy City. In a sense he was at one with that stonecutter
turned medieval knight, turned antiquities dealer, Haj Harun.
For Whittemore was the eternal knight-errant who "made
it" at Yale in the 1950s, "lost it" in the
CIA, and then made himself into a wonderful novelist with
the voice of a mystic. The voice of a mystic who had absorbed
the best of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. His great-grandfather
the minister and his great-grandmother the writer would have
been equally proud of him. His spirit rests peacefully in
Dorset, Vermont.
Tom Wallace
New York City, 2002
Updated
version posted 29 May 2013
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