THE
NATION/September 10, 1977
History on a Magic Carpet
SINAI TAPESTRY.
By Edward Whittemore. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 310
pp.
ANTHONY HEILBUT
When early in this
novel, the ur-Bible, the source of Western myth, is discovered,
its message is that "All prophecies were really histories
misplaced by tricks of time…memories in disguise".
This can be read as the credo of epic fiction or the despairing
cry of intellectuals defeated by history. Edward Whittemore's
novel prompts both responses and in a straightforward,
linear fashion, manages to render doubtful the very notion
that events in time can make up a story. Whittemore is
a deceptively lucid stylist. Were his syntax as cluttered
as Pynchon's or as conspicuously grand as Nabokov's or
Fuentes's, his virtually ignored recent novel might have
received the attention it deserves, for his imagination
of present and alternative worlds is comparable to theirs,
His ambition is to combine history and story, nonfiction
and fiction, in a Sinai tapestry so seamless that it achieves
the solidity of history itself. And to signal his attempt,
if not his achievement, Whittemore's last paragraphs display
the synoptic distance of a critic or historian. In the
sort of it literary joke that perhaps only an author can
appreciate, Whittemore found a sympathetic reader in the
writer of the book's jacket who cribbed most of its copy
from his last paragraphs, realizing that the novel's comprehension
extended even to itself.
In his first novel
Quin's Shanghai Circus, Whittemore explored the
Orient as he now does the Middle East and both novels'
happiest (perhaps only happy) vision is me of a great "unbroken sensual wheel made up of many sexes and
ages revolving through time." The permutations
and combinations of polymorphous perversity might appear
trivial. But Whittemore also presents the ends of more
"serious" preoccupations: the Japanese slaughter
of Chinese peasants in Quin and the genocide of Armenian
by Turks in Sinai are recalled from their historical
limbo. Whittemore knows that our century has seen more
than one holocaust all committed in the names of politics
and history
He enjoys floating
his characters on carpets of historical vision (his
hero Stern learns as a child to fly balloons in the
desert), and then pulling the rug out from under them
(Stern dies with his childhood and adult visions literally
bombed into oblivion). Every form of historical explanation
the novel proffers is challenged, interrogated and discarded
The eponymous Sinai tapestry is the original manuscript
of the Bible. This is a Holy (not Midrash but) Mishmash,
recited by a blind man and recorded by an idiot, in
which Jewish, Christian and Moslem myths interweave
themselves: Mohammed's buddy is Isaiah, Naomi's companion
is Mary, Jesus's mother is Fatima (Later Whittemore
turns Jesus into a Wandering Jew and consoles him by
moving Calvary into the heart of Jerusalem). So the
Bible offers no key at all, moral or hermeneutic to
an historical vision patched together from the gossip
of shepherds and itinerant tradesmen. But what of all
the other ways to read history? The 19th century gave
us several. This novel finds all the 19th-century prophets
superannuated adolescents pursuing illusions "caused
by a child's false perceptions of order above him"
and "an adult's inability to accept the sexual
chaos beneath him". As if to invite Marx and Freud
off their hobby horses and onto the sensual wheel.
In both his novels,
Whittemore dramatises history in the conventional conflict
of fathers and sons. But even the order of heredity
is sabotaged. One character, Strongbow, comes from a
line of English aristocrats in which the parents always
die young; another, Wallenstein comes from an Albanian
line of paranoids, all of whom are impotent and consequently
none of whom are related. Strongbow eventually fathers
a son by an Oriental Jewess but by then he has undergone
so many changes that he brings his son no specific legacy.
Haj Harun a Wandering Jew-Gentile-Moslem, born 3,000
years ago (and mercifully, except for the brief appellation "the fearless religious flasher of antiquity",
never a source of whimsy) has no offspring: he has the
gift of tongues but nowadays who listens? Zivi, a wealthy
Greek with some of Baron Charlus's chutzpah is a spiritual
father to a generation of political radicals: his fate
is to go mad during the Armenian
massacre.
In Strongbow and
his son Stern, Whittemore creates characters who so
enact the virtues and obsessions of their respective
centuries that a reconciliation in time seems as hopeless
for them as for Poldy Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. Strongbow
is absurdly larger than life (7 foot 7 inches tall,
deaf, sporting a monocle that magnifies his eye to the
diameter of 3 inches), but his decorum - and Whittemore's
- makes his behaviour and historical pronouncements
never less than appropriate. As a student at Cambridge,
he masters both fencing and botany: in one of the novel's
funniest moments he astonishes the college community
by discovering an hitherto unknown species of rose on
the river Cam. He shocks polite society by turning down
membership in a society of masturbators, but after forty
years in the Middle East, composes a forty volume work
of sexual lore which is really a 2 million word retelling
of a youthful romance. Whittemore knows how much a good
Victorian novelist could have made of Strongbow's story,
and in how many pages. He tells it all in less than
50.
Strongbow seeks
in the Sinai Tapestry a source of debunking, positive
proof that the moral foundations of Victorian England
rest on sinking sand. With equally Victorian fervor,
Wallenstein (the Albanian paranoid) wishes to hide the
manuscript, going the Grand Inquisitor one better by
denying fallen man any access to the truth. In the 20th
century an Irish veteran of Easter 1916 hunts the manuscript
as treasure, and eventually delivers it to a tribe of
North American Indians. But for Stern, the Bible with
its mingling of myths, provides proof that Palestine
is the homeland of three great Peoples, Arabs, Jews
and Christians, in a record made before they were divided
into those names. For Stern, pedantic squabbling over
textual unity becomes the stuff of political survival.
Whittemore curves
history to enclose his characters When an insulted Strongbow
writes Queen Victoria, prophesying that her name will
become "synonymous with ugly clutter and hidden
evil thoughts, arrogant pomposity and child prostitution"
his letter is so in keeping with his character and the
language and obsessions of a man of his class, that
Whittemore makes telegram seem news, its author a prophetic
genius. And Stern's far nobler but equally prophetic
vision of a Palestine that win be "a homeland for
all the peoples of his heritage" also seems the
proper culmination of a series of personal events. In
both instances ,the larger insight proceeds from the
smaller, personality predicts vision and history confirms
what his fiction anticipates so precisely that fact
seems Whittemore's fancy.
But he is not playing
games with us. Strongbow manages to purchase most of
the Middle East (!) but in a final act of healing sells
it all, so as to relieve his son "of the burdensome
legacy of that Empire he had acquired before Stern was
born, an irony immense enough to divide their two centuries
forever." It is ironic too that Stern could hope
to reconcile the peoples of the Middle East merely by
controlling their land, or that the son's altruistic
mentality could still bear the traces of the imperialist
explorer. But it is the historical distinctions that
Whittemore discovers, and with enough wit and compassion
to allow the irony to name itself.
Where such irony
obtains, no person can have the last word The observer
of all these men and their nebulous pursuits is an American
woman, Maud, who like the female Buddha of Quin's Shanghai
Circus, serves to reduce all masculine obsessions to
childish monomanias. In Maud, Stem meets his match but
the novel has so little faith in historical generativity
that their passion is sexless. Still, Maud's sensuality
resonates almost as deeply as Stern's vision, and after
his death, this strange granddaughter of an Indian squaw,
growing old alone in Cairo, is the only keeper of his
faith.
The object of Stern's
vision, the Sinai Bible, remains, but even it is rendered
meaningless by the political history it might have redeemed.
The Sinai tapestry "of lives that had raged through
vast secret wars and been struck dumb by equally vast
silences, textures harsh and soft in their guise of
colours, a cloak of life" is a work of literature,
a "chaotic book of life" But in an American
Indian village, the book will go unread, and irony beyond
anyone's expectations. After celebrating the text with
Borgesian intensity, Whittemore demolishes the book
and leaves only the life and the chaos, sensuality and
gibberish With disarming understatement, Whittemore
takes away what he has given. In the novel's most self-reflexive
irony, Whittemore offers the best 1977 hope for Middle
Eastern peace, relaizes it in an ancient text, and destroys
in 1942 its boldest dreamer. History and fiction are
seldom so provocatively confused
Anthony Heilbut is the author of The Gospel Sound: Good
News & Bad Times (Simon & Schuster), and is
currently working on a study of refugee intellectuals,
to be published by Viking Press.
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