HARPERS
MAGAZINE - MAY 1978 - B 0 O K S
CATHOLICISM BESERK IN THE HOLY LAND - By Jim Hougan
Jerusalem Poker
by Edward Whittemore. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, $10.95.
Who, then, is Edward
Whittemore and why isn't he famous? Obviously a man
capable of epic romance, who proved himself four years
ago with the publication of Quins Shanghai Circus, a
counterthriller of enormous ambition, wit. and tenderness.
He is, in fact. one of only a half-dozen novelists my
wife will let me buy in hardcover. Whittemore's second
book was Sinai Tapestry, though, and it was a disappointment:
a bizarre and often brilliant conundrum, it left the
reader with little more than hints and guesses. Marvelous
characters, situations and settings were established
and as suddenly abandoned. As a novel it seemed to be
a case of arrested development, as if the author had
tired of his own imagination before the reader had or,
more likely, he'd simply thrown up his hands and cried "It's too much! I'm insane" Predictably reviewers
scratched their heads and set the book aside without
a word. What did they know? What did I know?
Now Whittemore
has published his third novel, Jerusalem Poker, and
the news is very good indeed. It turns out that Sinai
Tapestry was the first in a projected quartet of novels
revolving around those same characters and themes, which
only appeared to have been abandoned. Sinai Tapestry,
then, was an overture rather than a failed symphony.
Jerusalem Poker amplifies its predecessor, fleshing
out the skeletal framework of a fabulous adventure.
The second novel is redeemed and made whole by the third.
For those haven't
read Whittemore, he presents himself as one of the last.
best arguments against television. He's an author of
extraordinary talents, albeit one who eludes comparison
with other writers. His sensibility bears a remote resemblance
to that of Torn Robbins (Even Cowgirls Get the Blues)
and his world view (if that's the term) reminds me of
Joseph Heller before he blundered into therapy. And
yet, because Whittemore gives us some reason to have
hope for his characters, his humor is not so much black
as it is dark blue. Unlike Tom Robbins's, his perspective
is more universal than generational: that is, he doesn't
remind me constantly of the 1960s. Another writer with
whom Whittemore is sometimes compared is the alleged
Thomas Pynchon. The comparison makes sense because Whittemore,
like Pynchon, is a fine writer who can imagine characters
and conspiracies that are bigger both of us, dear reader.
Pynchon, however, is a novelist who sometimes as in
Gravity's Rainbow writes too well. He sets out self-consciously,
to create Literature in the same way that a sniper might
stalk his quarry through the Mekong Delta: step after
step, step after step, he moves forward without bending
a twig until BANG - another sentence lies dead on the
page. The author of Jerusalem Poker is not so grim.
So what's it about?
Well, it's like this:
The Ottoman and
Hapsburg empires have collapsed; the nineteenth century
has ended. and its successor has commenced with the
usual inaugural bloodbath (World War I). On a cold day
in Jerusalem, with "snow definitely in the air'"
(a temporal blizzard on the metaphorical level lads
) three exiles - an Arab. a Jew. and a Christian - deal
out cards in a dirty cafe. Thus begins the Great Jerusalem
Poker Game that will continue for twelve years and determine
which of the three heroes will gain clandestine control
of "everyone's Holy City. For Cairo Martyr, a blue-eyed
black whose shoulder. is the temporary refuge of an
albino monkey given to bouts of onanism., Jerusalem
is the stepping-stone to a vengeful sacrilege he aspires
to commit in Mecca.
Elsewhere, however
a mad Albanian fascist of enormous wealth and transcendental
paranoia is rapidly going insane as he inhales: mercury
fumes in the course of alchemical experiments designed
to provide him with the Philosopher's Stone He is Nubar
Wallenstein founder of the Albanian-Afghan Sacred Band,
an elite strike force of homosexual peasant boys whose
militaristic revels are to brought to a sudden halt
by the decapitation of Wallenstein's lover, an alcoholic
Afghan prince. Finding it prudent to leave Albania,
Nubar takes residence in a Venetian palazzo beside the
Grand Canal. The sole heir of "Madame Seven Percent",
herself the architect of a successful multinational
conspiracy to divide the oil reserves of the Middle
East among a handful of firms,. Nubar is also the founder
and Top Bongo of the Uranist Intelligence Agency (UIA)
- a private apparat of criminal literary agents turned
spies. In an effort to fathom the secret nature of the
Great Jerusalem Poker Game, while at the same time pursuing
the Stone with unusual vigor and viciousness, Nubar
targets the UIA against the Holy City's cardplayers.
Unfortunately he has little inclination to read the
intelligence reports written by the secret agents of
Dead Sea Control. Instead, he haunts the plazas of Venice
by night, haranguing nervous passersby with lies about
the Albanian-Afghan Sacred Band (conveniently renamed
in the days after his lover lost his head, the All-Afghan
Sacred Band). It's giving little away, as they say,
to reveal that Nubar comes to an unhappy end in the
palazzo as the Great Jerusalem Poker Game draws to a
close in 1933.
That's a rough
sketch of what the book's "about" which isn't
a very useful way to describe it because Jerusalem Poker
takes place within the framework of its predecessor
novel., Sinai Tapestry - a book that spans centuries
and sets the mysteries spinning (Who is Plantagenet
Strongbow? Why has he written a thirty- three-volume
study of "Levantine Sex?" What relationship
does he bear to the Sinai Bible? Why is his son running
guns in a hot-air balloon in the desert And - by no
means finally - why are the Wallenstein males, fathers
and sons through the centuries, all insane when no one
of them happens to be related to another? And how can
this be?). This first half of the quartet. then sets
in motion an epic of profound invention, one that promises
to be as fascinating and self contained as Lord of the
Rings.
Whittemore is more
easily compared with Tolkien than with other writers
who come to mind. His novels, remind me of the tragic
hilarity of Buster Keaton and, in a way, of the Watts
Towers-those implausible and bathetic spires in Southern
California, cement assemblages of graffiti and broken
glass. His books are sorrowing delights, reflective
and heavily plotted. The milieu is one with which readers
of espionage novels may think themselves familiar, and
yet it's wholly transformed - by the writer's wild humor,
his mystical bent and his bicameral perception of history
and time. As this suggests, the contradictions in Jerusalem
Poker and the other novels are wholly intentional. The
author appears to be a ... well, a sort of berserk Tantric
adept of catholic experience and Catholic upbringing:
the .Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost, and the two Marys
are very much at large in all his books. The world they
operate in is a timeless one in which historical events
are repeated ad infinitum: the same crucifixions and
massacres are carried out against the same innocents
by the same lunatics for the same reasons - nasty sex
and filthy lucre - forever and ever, amen. The massacre
at Mukden (in Quins Shanghai Circus) is one with the
butchery at Smyrna (in Sinai Tapestry) and with the
periodic rape of the Holy City by various barbarian
armies (.in Jerusalem Poker). Only the names and the
uniforms change. Time, then, is seen as a continuum
in the literal sense of the word and in the context
of Whittemore's florid vision, anachronisms have the
force of revelation. Thus. One of his protagonists,
the formidable Irish rebel and gunrunner named O'Sullivan
Beare, can be found on a nostalgic journey flying a
Sopwith Camel across the deserts of the Sinai while
wearing the uniform of a Crimean War hero, his only
cargo a wicker basket of fresh figs and bottles of home-brewed
Erse poteen dated AD 1122. (As for the character who's
3.000 years old, an antiquities dealer garbed in a Crusader's
helmet that sends an almost continuous shower of rust
into his weeping eyes, his story is even more complex
and the reader would do well to sort it out himself.
This isn't to say
that Whittemore is without fault. His romanticism occasionally
descends to the sentimental The relationships between
characters and events are frequently so byzantine that
expository passages sometimes serve only to remind one
that the author is writing in four dimensions while
the reader has been left in the third. Moreover, Whittemore
does tend to go on a bit at times. And as for his apparently
mystical regard for the "unbroken sensual wheel
... revolving through time", I find it no more
convincing than Celine's inverted politics or Yeats's
obsession with the phases of the moon. But these are
mere cavils, obligatory in a review.
If Whittemore was
no more than an "entertainer" his novels would
be worth their price. But he does something more difficult
than intellectual vaudeville. He assassinates the banal,
revealing the authentic current of madness that courses
through human affairs, reminding us that the fantastic
is ubiquitous, invisible only because We've shut our
eyes to it. Listen to Stern and 0'Sullivan Beare:
Who was I?
Well I'll tell
you then. The very article, that's who you were. Himself
Who's that?
God. Now how's
that for a case of mistaken identity? It beats Strongbow
by more than a little and as I've often said, we have
to give Haj Harun credit, we do. When he limps out
there into the desert to find his way to Mecca, he
sees the sights. Well this sight, and none can match
it, occurred at dawn. You were up in your balloon
running guns and when you came down at dawn to hide
out you nearly landed right on top of Haj Harun, who
naturally thought you were God coming down to reward
him for his three thousand years of trying to defend
the Holy City, always on the losing side. It must
have been around 1914, remember it now? A broken-down
old Arab in the desert at dawn tottering on spindly
legs? His eyes permanently feverish with dreams from
the Thousand and One Nights? And you coming down in
your balloon and him prostrating himself and asking
you if you would tell him your name? Remember?
Yes, I do now.
Well how about
that then?
Stem smiled sadly.
He stared down at his fists and said nothing.
Well?
It's not funny,
whispered Stem after a moment. To be rewarded by a
petty gunrunner in a balloon. It's not funny. Not
when you have faith the way Haj Harun does.
Hold on there,
said Joe, you're getting it all wrong. Not rewarded
by you, rewarded by God. Listen, you've never seen
eyes on this earth shine like Haj Harun's when he
talks about meeting Stem in the desert at dawn. Stem,
he murmurs, and his whole face glows with strength
enough to defend the Holy City, always losing of course,
for another three thousand years. Stern, he says,
God manifesting Himself at dawn in the desert for
me. And 1 told Him, he says, that I knew God has many
names and that each one we learn brings us closer
to Him, and I asked Him His name that day in the desert
at dawn and He deigned to tell me, finding some virtue
in my mission, even though I've always failed. Stern,
he murmurs, and he's ready for anything, and nothing
can stop him now or ever. And I tell you that's the
way he saw it out there so that's the way it was,
and you're the one who did it, Stern. Eyes that shine
like that, it's enough to make a man cry. So you've
got to let him have his due, Stern. He worked hard
for that moment to come, and it finally did come,
and he deserved it. And if God turns out to be a gunrunner
crossing the desert in a balloon in 1914? Well what
can we say about that. If that's the way it is, then
you and me, we just have to accept it. We might prefer
another vision of God but that's the one that came
to the man who deserved a vision of God. Me, I've
always known Haj Harun sees more than the rest of
us. You wouldn't argue with that, would you?
No.
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