Portland, ME / New Haven/ Japan/ New York/ Crete/ Jerusalem/ New York/ Dorset, VT.

"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 began Quin's Shanghai Circus; it ended 292 pages later with the largest funeral procession held in Asia since the thirteenth century.

The year was 1974, the author 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 CIA and I to a career in 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 (1977), Jerusalem Poker (1978), Nile Shadows (1983), and Jericho Mosaic (1987). 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 a totally transformed by the writer's wild humor, his mystical bent, and his bicameral perception of history and time."

Edward Whittemore died of 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, and the Quartet was published in Great Britain, Holland and Germany where Whittemore was described on the jacket as "the American master storyteller."

* * *

Whittemore graduated from Deering High School, Portland, Maine, in June 1951 and entered Yale that Fall, a member of the Class of 1955. One writer has labeled Yale undergraduates of the 1950s as members of the "Silent Generation." The fifties were also the "Eisenhower Years," that comfortable period between the Second World War and the radicalism and campus unrest of the 1960s. Ivy League universities were still dominated by 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. After receiving "gentlemanly Cs" at Yale and the other Ivys, they usually 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 on the tennis courts and squash courts and in the swimming pool in the Payne Whitney Gymnasium. They ran the Yale Daily News, WYBC (the campus radio station), The Record (the humor magazine), the Yale Banner (the yearbook), and sang in various Yale music groups. They usually were members of a fraternity and were "tapped" by one of the six 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 the fact that he was Managing Editor of the 1955 Yale News Board at a time when the News` chairmen and managing editors were as popular as football captains and the leading scholars of the class. During 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, 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 and NBC, and go on to write many books, mostly non-fiction to be sure.

I met Ted early in the spring of freshman year. We were both News "heelers" in the spring "comp," and as was usually the case with survivors of that fierce competition to make the News, we remained friends through the next three years. 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 Whittemore's older brother later worked. Or, that at the very least, he would get on the journalistic fast track somewhere in the Time-Life empire founded by an earlier Yale News worthy, Henry Luce.

But we were wrong. After a tour of duty as an officer in the Marines in Japan, he was approached there by the CIA, given a crash course in Japanese, and spent more than a decade working for the Agency in the Far East, Europe and the Middle East.

During those years, Whittemore would sporadically return to New York. "What are you up to?" one would ask. For a while he was running a newspaper in Greece. Then there was a shoe company in Italy, and even a stint with the drug administration under Mayor John Lindsay. Later, there were rumors that he had been drinking and that there were drugs.

He married and divorced twice while he was with the Marines and theAgency. He and his first wife had two daughters from whom he was separated early on. While they were growing up on the West Coast he was not allowed to see them. It was part of the divorce settlement. And then there were the women he lived with in later years. There were many; they all seemed to be talented - painters, photographers, sculptors and dancers, but never writers.

There were more rumors. He had left the Agency, he was living in Crete on no money, he was writing. Then silence. Clearly, the "fair-haired" undergraduate had not gone on to fame and glory.

* * *

It wasn't until 1972 or 1973 that Ted resurfaced in my life. He was back in New York on a visit. He had a manuscript of a novel that he wanted me to read. After spending two more years at Yale doing graduate work in history and a year in Vienna and Berlin, I returned to New York late in 1958. While Ted was working for the United States government, I was editing books for G. P. Putnam Sons, as it was then called. I had moved over to Holt, Rinehart and Winston, a largish textbook house shortly to be purchased by CBS, in 1963. 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 drafts before we published it. Set in Japan and China before and during the Second World War, two drafts 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 I have already said, Quin was a bigger success with the critics than it was in the bookstores. Readers loved the novel, but they weren't 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 the Jerusalem Quartet. Set in the heyday of the British Empire, the novel took 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"; O'Sullivan Beare, 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 rusty Crusaders 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 where in power, and a distributor of hashish and goats for the Turks. Whittemore's characters were not only the product of his marvelous imagination. When I first went to Israel, in 1977, Whittemore was working away at a new novel in New York, but he had given me the names and addresses of several people in Jerusalem. One was Mohammed, the owner of an antique gallery. When I finally tracked him down I found a fey character who, if he had been wearing a faded yellow cloak and a dusty helmet, would have been a dead ringer for Haj Harun.

Clearly Ted had been caught up in a new life in Jerusalem, the Holy City. The interim years in Crete where he had been living on a modest pension in the early seventies were behind him. He had shared a house with friends in Khania, the second largest city on Crete. In its long history it had been conquered by the Romans, occupied by the Arabs, Byzantines, and the Venetians before becoming a part of the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century. Now it was a sprawling Greek city, Athens without the Parthenon but with an even richer history. A perfect place for a former intelligence agent to take stock and decide where he fitted in, what "it," history that is, was all about, to re-examine what he had learned as a Yale undergraduate; classical Greek and Rome, Christianity and the decline of Europe during the Middle Ages, and its revival beginning in the fifteenth century. And the world outside the ken of a 1950s American undergraduate: the Arab revolt that swept up from the Arabian desert and Asia, both undoubtedly unknown to Ted before he was recruited by the Agency in Japan.

In Crete he began to write again (while in Japan in the 1960s he had written two unpublished novels, one about the Japanese game of Go, the other about a young American expatriate living in Tokyo), slowly, awkwardly, experimenting with voice, style, and subject matter, distilling his experiences in the Agency into that sweeping, raucous epic, Quin's Shanghai Circus. But now that he had embarked on the Quartet he was more assured of himself, he was becoming a 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 hurnor was still often grotesque, macabre, and there was violence aplenty. But there was also a new serenity, an understanding of the mysteries of life. And there was a woman, a photographer, Carol, with whom Ted lived when he was in New York.

The new novel, finally published late 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 such an important game for the secret control of Jerusalem be played but in the antiquities shop of Haj Harun? Actually, Whittemore did not come to live permanently (that is, "permanent" according to his ways) in Jerusalem until he was well into writing his Quartet. His knowledge of Jerusalem was based initially on books, but later on his endless wanderings through the crowded, teeming streets and Quarters of the Old City populated by merchants of every kind (food, cotton, rugs), butchers, tanners, glass blowers, jewelers, silversmiths and even ironmongers, speaking nearly every known language and dressed in all the vibrant and exotic costumes of the Mid East. As I once remarked to Ted, I fully expected that we would run into Sinbad the Sailor coming the other way while we were making our way along a narrow passage in the Arab Quarter.

The next time I visited Jerusalem, Ted had settled down with Helen, an American artist, in a spacious apartment in a large stone nineteenth-century building in a compound owned by the Ethiopian Church. Their 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, or so it seemed to me, twenty-four hours a day. And standing or quietly reading in the courtyard were the monks. One morning I awoke at six in my sunlit room and heard the nuns singing a cappella. They sounded like birds and I thought I was in heaven.

After a midday nap we usually headed for the Old City, invariably ending up at the same café, probably a pretentious description of what was little more than an outdoor tea garden where hot tea and sticky buns were readily available. 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 vaguely 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. They regarded him as their America guru.

By 1981, Whittemore was living most of the year in the apartment in the Ethiopian compound, but in the years ahead he also rented a series of rooms in New York, a walkup on Lexington Avenue, and a studio apartment over on Third Avenue. And he was writing steadily as well. I had left Holt earlier that spring for another publishing house and Judy Karasik took over the editorial work on Whittemore's new novel, Nile Shadows. A talented editor who has since left book publishing to the sorrow of her many authors, she wrote the epilogue to this book, a eulogy which she should have but didn't give at Whittemore's funeral twelve years after Nile Shadows appeared. It gives one of the best accounts of the working relationship between a writer and an editor that I have ever come across.

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 characters - some old, some new- invented by Whittemore hold the fate of the world in their hands. It was a world at war, a violent world. At the very beginning of the novel, Stem, 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. Elsewhere he describes with horrific abandon "the rape" of Nanking, the sack of Smyrna in 1922 when the Turks butchered tens of thousands of Greek men, women, and children. A Publishers Weekly reviewer said: "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 deserve."

But sales hadn't caught up with the critics. By the spring of 1985 he was finishing the novel that was to be called Jericho Mosaic, the fourth volume 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 monasteries in the Judean wilderness. Since they were built into solid rock at the bottom of isolated ravines reachable only via narrow paths, we had to leave our 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 their rocky quarters, not much more than elaborate caves, and consuming some dreadful retsina (the monks didn't drink it themselves), we drove on down to Jericho and the typical lunch of dried figs, a bread-like pastry and melons and some 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 treated like old friends at several encampments. We spent one night at an Israeli meteorological center/desert hostel 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 Bejing could probably hear every sparrow fart in the desert. In retrospect, I sometimes wondered if Ted had not really retired, if he was still visiting his CIA controller and using me as a cover? But my fantasy was probably due to the fact that I had read too many novels by Graham Greene and John LeCarre, two of Whittemore's favorite writers.

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 W. W. 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 capstone to Whittemore's marvelous Quartet. In my opinion, Jericho Mosaic is the most breathtakingly original espionage story ever written. Based on events that actually took place before the Six Day War, Whittemore demonstrates his total knowledge of the craft of intelligence, his love for the Middle East, his devotion to the Holy City and his passion for peace and understanding between Arabs and Jews (and Christians). The novel and the novelist maintain that we can overcome religious, philosophical and political differences if we are ready to commit ourselves to wisdom, patience and true understanding for all peoples and all ideas. This humanistic message is embedded in a spy story involving Eli Cohen, a Syrian Jew who sacrificed his life in order that Israel might survive.

In the novel, a Syrian who has become in the 1950s a successful businessman in Buenos Aires returns to his homeland to help forward the Arab revolution. This patriot, Halim, becomes an outspoken advocate for Palestinian rights, "the incorruptible one", the conscience of the Arab cause. But Halim is in fact a Jew, a double agent for the Mossad, codename "the runner" his assignment to penetrate to the heart of the Syrian military. At the same time, it 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 the oasis of Jericho discussing religion and humanity's relation to its various faces.

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, magazines and on television every day, and even more horrific stories. Times were not propitious for novelists trumpeting the eternal verities, no matter how well they wrote. One critic, however, did 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 for the winter with first Ann, a woman he had met years before; she, her husband, Ted, and his first wife had been close friends. In the summers he would take over his sprawling, white 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 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 his great-grandparents. Ted's brothers and sisters by now all had their own houses and so Ted was pretty much its sole occupant. It was not winterized and could be inhabited only from May through October. But for Ted it was a haven to which he could retreat and write.

* * *

I had become a literary agent in the Spring of 1987. American book publishing was gradually being taken over by international conglomerates with corporate offices basically in Germany and Great Britain. They were proving to be more enamored of commerce than literature and it seemed to me that 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 late September and early October in Dorset. The "foliage season" is a very special time of year in New England: crisp clear autumn 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, drinks in hand and smoking cigars. Actually, I was the one with the drink and the cigar. Ted had stopped drinking years ago (his "habit" had become so serious that he had joined Alcoholics Anonymous) and merely smoked one evil-looking cheroot at night. 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, we would talk late into the night, not about Yale or his years with the CIA, but about books and writing and his family and friends. Ted was the "black sheep," the Yalie who had gone off to the CIA, had, so to speak, burned out, and had come home via Crete and Jerusalem as a peripatetic novelist whose books received glowing reviews that resulted in less than glowing sales. But his family, and even more at this point, "his women," supported him and continued to believe in him. He was virtually penniless, but his older brothers and sisters supplied a roof over his head.

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 that white, rambling clapboard house in Dorset were shelves of fading leatherbound volumes of his Prentiss great-grandmother's popular romances written for shop girls, informing them how to improve themselves, dress, find suitable husbands. I gathered she was the Danielle Steele of her day, and the family's modest wealth was due more to her literary efforts than the generosity of the 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 the Kid flees 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 the Kid and his faith healer spend their month of love (from the very beginning she makes it clear that their idyll must be limited to one month) has a walled garden behind it, full of lemon trees and singing birds, and although the house is in southern California, this walled garden of Ted's imagination was in Jerusalem, in the Ethiopian compound, with a synagogue on one side and a Cistercian convent on the other, where he had lived with Helen, the American painter.

Then one day in early spring 1995, Ted called me in New York. Could he come by the office that morning? I assumed it was to deliver the long-awaited new novel (there had been two false starts after Jericho Mosaic). Instead, it was to tell me that he was dying of prostate cancer. Would I agree to 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 he had gone into remission. But now the cancer 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 "his women," one of whom, Carol, had returned to his life after nearly a two-decade separation.

There was a hushed, moving 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, which had been Ted's "summer home" for the last decade of his life. 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, two brothers and their spouses, nieces and nephews with their own families (but not his wives or the two daughters who had flown to New York to say "good-bye" to the father they hardly knew on his deathbed), there were neighbors, Yale friends, and a couple of colleagues from the Lindsay years. Were there any "spooks" in attendance? I really can't say, but there were eight "spooks" of a different sort from Yale, members of the 1955 Scroll and Keys delegation. Ann and Carol, were there. They had become allies while watching over Ted during those last bitter days.

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 mud in the spring) where Dorset nestled between ridges of the softly rolling Green Mountains. Once one of the cradles of the Revolution and American democracy and later a thriving farming and small manufacturing community, it was a place where time had stood still since the beginning of the twentieth century. One was the subject of Whittemore's dreams and books. The other was the peaceful retreat in which he dreamed and wrote the last ten summers of his life.

Ted had finally come home to New England. It had been a long journey: Portland, New Haven, Japan, Italy, Greece, Crete, Jerusalem, New York and now Dorset, Vermont. 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 beloved Holy City. In a sense he was at one with that stone-cutter turned waiter, 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 in the 1960s, and then made himself into a wonderful novelist with a unique voice. The voice of a mystic who had absorbed the best of Judaism, Christianity and the Muslim faith. 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.

©Thomas C. Wallace
New York City, June 2000