Quin?s Shanghai Circus Read online

  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 a
nd 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

  INTRODUCTION

  WHO KNOWS HOW TED Whittemore came upon this fabulation? By way of introduction, I just finished reading Philip Short’s enormous and compelling biography of Mao Zedong, published in the year 2000. It is so rich, fascinating, and full of history, chicanery, adventure, corruption, and amazing action, that afterwards you need to inhale straight oxygen from a canister for a while simply to recover.

  That’s the same feeling produced here by Ted Whittemore’s first novel (written long before Philip Short put the hammer to Mao), now reissued twenty-six years after it debuted thanks to Holt, Rinehart, and Winston (in 1974). It’s a novel as complicated and luridly interesting as a pornographic tattoo parlor, as recondite (in the extreme) as the Kabala, as comic—sometimes!—as the Three Stooges. In short, it is totally amusing (and intriguing) at every twist and turn (of which there are many).

  Talk about your inscrutable orient. Whittemore takes us there, and then some. If you like sadistic Japanese gangsters with downright mythical powers, you’ll love this book. If fantasmagoric rock and rollers from another age and another country are your bag, Quin’s Shanghai Circus should be graphically titillating. If you’re in love with the mystical tough underside of our absurdist Twentieth Century skullduggeries, you will get it here served up on a silver platter.

  Some of the novel is outrageous cartoon, some is exasperating erudition. All of it is crisply written, occasionally with tongue in cheek, often earnestly weighed down with pathos, and not infrequently suffused with a thrilling violence. Whittemore manipulates history (and convoluted plotlines) like a magician who has smoked enough opium to sink a battleship. “Colorful” is hardly the word for this book; “insane” might be more appropriate, except that despite all the surface confusion the author obviously knows exactly what he is about, and everything eventually comes together.

  The story takes place “At the onset of an era given to murders and assassinations,” says the narrator, “a time when a hunger for human flesh rumbled in men’s bowels. Look what happened in Nanking where a sergeant strangled his own commanding general. When he told me that on the beach, I knew I was hearing a voice direct from the rectum of lunacy. No one but me would probably ever believe such a voice, but that doesn’t matter now.”

  That voice “direct from the rectum of lunacy” is manipulated, throughout the story, by chance, strained coincidence, deliberate farce, and melodramatic hyperbole. Here’s a passage describing how the enormous clown, Geraty, submits to a grilling by Quin himself:

  “The fat man muttered and swore, laughed, lied when there seemed no reason to lie, and then corrected himself before wandering off on some byway of his four decades of travel through Asia, He recited Manchurian telephone numbers and Chinese addresses, changed costumes, sang circus songs, beat a drum and played a flute, consumed bowls of horseradish and mounds of turnips, sneaked through the black-market district of Mukden late in 1934 and again in 1935, noting discrepancies, brought out all the peeling props and threadbare disguises of an aging clown working his way around the ring. Grinning, weeping, he eventually revealed how he had discovered thirty years ago that Lamereaux was the head of an espionage network in Japan, a network with such an ingenious communication system it was the most successful spy ring in Asia in the years leading up to the Second World War. The information had come to Geraty by chance because he happened to fall asleep in a Tokyo cemetery …”

  That’s a good enough description of this book and its tone. Whittemore thrives on creating apocalyptic confusion and then setting things straight. He loves spies, and enjoys leading us down one path, and then up a totally different one. Half the time we don’t really know where we’re at, but that’s the fun—and the funhouse—of it. Whittemore, a master of deceptions, doesn’t miss a bewildering trick. At one point a character says, “Life is brief and we must listen to every sound.” Novels are essentially brief also, but this prose wonderkind certainly listens to every sound.

  I don’t know much about Ted Whittemore. He’s dead. He died in 1995. Rumor has it that he once worked for the CIA, and maybe he was a Russian double agent on the Middle Eastern beat, maybe not. “Whatever,” as Kurt Cobain might’ve said. The fact is, Ted seems to have led a bizarre and complicated and rather mysterious life that fed a bizarre and complicated imagination, and he could write like hell … about hell, and about everything in between.

  When you aren’t flinching at the pedophiles and the necromancy, you are liable to be chuckling up a storm. In Quin’s Shanghai Circus all roads lead to the rape of Nanking by the Japanese in 1937, painted—of course—by the alter ego of Ted Whittemore, Hieronymous Bosch. You don’t really want to go there, girlfriend—but you can’t stop from turning such deliciously malevolent pages.

  It’s grotesque, the whole mordant circus, and sometimes too arcane for words, and often frustrating, and not a little scary (and excessive) and screwball, but it’s about what happened (more or less) leading up to World War II, and the author rarely glosses over the horrors, or the brief magnificent euphorias of our tragic human experience.

  After this novel, Whittemore went on to distinguish himself with The Jerusalem Quartet, a vibrant stew of richly invented books that would put Lawrence Durrell on notice, and may yet claim for Ted a piece of the immortal action in our groves of academe.

  But Quin’s came first, greased the skids, as they say, and it is a fascinating novel. You can’t pigeonhole the thing. It can revulse you as much as anything William H. Burroughs (or Hubert Selby Jr.) ever wrote: Naked Lunch meets Last Exit to Shanghai. But although there’s a lot of disturbing stuff for the queasy stomach to rebel against, there’s also a rich and deranged heartbeat that captures the bustling panorama we all call “home.”

  Abandon all hope, ye who enter here … and prepare for a bumpy, yet illuminating, ride. Tennessee Williams once said something to the effect that if it weren’t for his devils his angels would have no place to go. Ted Whittemore has angels and devils galore, and their wide range of halos and pitchforks drive this lusty debauch toward its rousing conclusion.

  You can’t say I didn’t warn you … but isn’t that the point?

  John Nichols

  Taos, New Mexico 2002

  To remain whole, be twisted.

  To become straight, let yourself be bent.

  To become full, be hollow.

  Be tattered, that you may be renewed.

  Those that have little, may get more,

  Those that have much, are but perplexed.

  The Sage does not show himself, therefore he is seen everywhere.

  He does not define himself, therefore he is distinct.

  He does not boast of what he will do, therefore he succeeds.

  He is not proud of his work,
and therefore it endures.

  He does not contend,

  And for that very reason no one under heaven can contend with him.

  —Tao Te Ching

  For by grace are ye saved through faith, and that not of yourselves. It is the gift of God. Not of works, lest any man should boast.

  —Ephesians 2

  THE IMPOSTOR

  1

  The suspicious illness and subsequent investigation of a corporal serving in Mukden suggest that an espionage network with astonishing capabilities is operating within the Empire.

  The net has access to such important material it must include a member of the General Staff, in addition to whatever foreigners are involved.

  The corporal died while undergoing questioning. Just before death, however, he revealed two unrelated facts.

  1. The code name of the net is Gobi (the barbarian name for the great desert in western China).

  2. The unknown disease from which he was suffering is called, phonetically, Lam-ah-row’s Lumbago.

  —From a secret report submitted in the autumn of 1937 to Baron Kikuchi, Japanese General in charge of intelligence activities in Manchuria.

  The report was said to have been seen in the archives of the Imperial Japanese Army immediately after the surrender in 1945. But it never reached Allied intelligence officers, having been either lost or destroyed in the first days of the Occupation.