If Marina Oswald had
let her husband Lee make love to her on the evening of 21 November
1963, John Kennedy might still be alive. This is the major conclusion
one can draw from Norman Mailer's 800-page excursion into the life
and mind of the world's best-known alleged assassin.
Americans have always
been keener on myth than reality, and few American writers have had a
sharper grasp of American myth than Mailer. His forte has been taking
real people and focusing his intellect and his instincts on what it
is that turns them mythic. He has done this both in fiction (with JFK
himself in An American Dream) and non-fiction (Richard Nixon, Marilyn
Monroe, and, most tellingly, Gary Gilmore in The Executioner's Song).
In many of these cases, it is death itself which confirms iconic
status; this is true of John Kennedy and it should be true of Oswald
as well. Certainly Mailer would like it to be.
The problem is that
Oswald is no Gary Gilmore, and in trying to move him into iconic
territory Mailer forgets his own instincts for American myth. A 'lone
crazed assassin' might play better for his purposes, but reality has
stacked the deck against such an interpretation of Oswald, not least
because as a lone assassin he is so mundane. Instead, it is Oswald
the patsy, and the JFK conspiracy, that has reached the level of
myth.
In 1970, we might have
welcomed Mailer's excursion into the conspiratorial quicksands of the
assassination. Today, an increasingly prolix Mailer ignores the
very lessons of deception he provided just four years ago in his own CIA epic, Harlot's Ghost,
and seems content to tie some extensive research together with some
dubious sources in a loose bow that comes undone almost instantly.
The new material in
Oswald's Tale, much of it assembled by Lawrence Schiller, is an
exhaustive combination of interviews conducted in Moscow and Minsk,
along with transcripts of the KGB's bugging of Oswald and Marina's
flat. Those looking for new insight into the mind and character of
Oswald will be sorely disappointed—as will those looking for
photographs. There is a good deal of repetition, and at times Mailer
seems keener, or at least content, to reveal the character of life in
the old Soviet Union, not for any insight it may throw on Oswald or
his motives, but just for the chance to apply his metaphoric skills
to another country. Certainly the new republic of Belarus may have
welcomed that. But after all the information has been disseminated,
the picture of Oswald still has huge questions, and Mailer's answers
leave huge holes.
One might expect those
holes to be filled once Oswald returns to the USA, but it is here the
book falls apart. Mailer's two main sources for this period are
Priscilla Johnson MacMillan's Marina and Lee and Gerald Posner's Case
Closed (Posner's book itself draws heavily on the former). This is
akin to using Mein Kampf as your primary source for a book about the
Holocaust.
The best that can be
said about Marina and Lee is that government agents sequestered
Marina Oswald, who feared deportation, AND granted MacMillan
exclusive access to her. Like others handed exclusives, she delivered
what those granting the favour desired: a portrait of a lone crazed
assassin in the making. It was not her first encounter with Oswald; in Moscow she had interviewed the putative defector; she has admitted to at least being debriefed by the CIA when she returned to Boston, though not to having discussed Oswald at all. Marina Oswald's story changed over the years, depending on who she was talking to. Mailer's interpretation of Marina's various
testimonies is a keystone in granting Oswald his killer's status, yet
as recently as 1993 Marina herself said unequivocally that 'Lee did
not do it'.
Posner takes things a
step further, by distorting or ignoring the case for conspiracy.
Mailer obviously distrusts Case Closed; he has referred to Posner as
'only intermittently reliable', and occasionally he points out some
of Posner's more blatant twistings of the record. Amazingly, he still
relies on the book as a primary source. By following Posner, Mailer
accepts a world full of extraordinary coincidence, in which none of
the coincidences are meaningful. Oswald becomes a homicidal Zelig popping up a the right time in the Texas School Book Depository, 
while the
people who shared the stage with him are simply written out of his
tale. Posner's book was billed as being definitive on the JFK
assassination; really it is a clumsy bit of extended character
assassination: if we can convince you Oswald really was a nutter then
you'll ignore the evidence and believe he acted alone.
while the
people who shared the stage with him are simply written out of his
tale. Posner's book was billed as being definitive on the JFK
assassination; really it is a clumsy bit of extended character
assassination: if we can convince you Oswald really was a nutter then
you'll ignore the evidence and believe he acted alone.
Having journeyed 800
pages trying to build a portrait of Oswald as a singular force in
history, Mailer is obliged, like Posner, to ignore the most obvious
interpretation of Oswald's seemingly delusional and often
contradictory psyche: he was the perfect candidate to be set up as
someone's patsy. Mailer's coy dance around the possibility of
Oswald's homosexuality lends the word patsy a particular vibrancy.
Don De Lillo, in Libra, showed us more behind the shadows of those
gay contacts, particularly the bizarre David Ferrie. Oliver Stone was
accused, like Jim Garrison before him, of using Clay Shaw's sexuality
to help demonise the possible conspirators, even Oswald. But for
Mailer, this aspect of Oswald merely hints at why Marina wouldn't put
out on that fateful night.
Proving there was a
conspiracy requires showing only that a few of the myriad
coincidences of Oswald's life are not merely random. Jack Ruby has
always been a short-odds entry in that sweepstakes. For example, when
Ruby corrected Dallas 
DA Henry Wade's reference to Oswald's
subversive activities' at the Friday night press conference ('that's
Fair Play For Cuba Committee') we wonder how Ruby knew the name of
Oswald's bogus committee, and why he thought it crucial to set the
record straight. Maybe he was just another pathetic attention-seeker,
but witnesses also placed him with
Oswald in his strip joint, the Carousel Club; in Dealey Plaza that morning; and at Parkland Hospital when JFK died.
DA Henry Wade's reference to Oswald's
subversive activities' at the Friday night press conference ('that's
Fair Play For Cuba Committee') we wonder how Ruby knew the name of
Oswald's bogus committee, and why he thought it crucial to set the
record straight. Maybe he was just another pathetic attention-seeker,
but witnesses also placed him with
Oswald in his strip joint, the Carousel Club; in Dealey Plaza that morning; and at Parkland Hospital when JFK died.
The problem is that if
just a few facts which suggest a conspiracy are real, then they
challenge the hypothesis of Oswald as Norman Bates, as a lone crazed
assassin, and Mailer must seek his new Gary Gilmore elsewhere.
Oswald's Tale is indeed an American mystery, because Kennedy's death
was the product of something more than an unrequited hard-on. That
has always been Mailer's territory, but once upon a time Mailer would
have been less concerned with solving the mystery, and more concerned
with the deeper tale of an American tragedy.
Oswald's Tale: An American Tragedy by Norman Mailer
Little Brown, 1995, £25
No comments :
Post a Comment