OSWALD'S TALE: THE SPECTATOR REVIEW

This review of Norman Mailer's Oswald's Tale first appeared in the Spectator, 2 September 1995. I dug it out when I was writing my script for my Open Book essay on the literature of the JFK assassination, which I will also post here in its original form sometime after tomorrow's repeat broadcast of Open Book. What follows is slightly different from the published review-- I've made a correction, incorporated some of the ideas from my original draft, and added one or two small points--but it is substantially the same. I was tempted to go off on a tangent, comparing the Kennedys of An American Dream and Oswald's Tale, or the Kennedy of the former with Oswald himself, but that's really a whole separate essay! And I do wish that Mailer had been able to fulfill his promise at the end of Harlot's Ghost: 'to be continued'. And yes, the Henry Wade who was Dallas DA (and denied knowing Jack Ruby, which was easily disproved) is the same DA who was the defendant in Roe vs Wade).

 

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.

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.

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

HITLER AND GELI: KRIS RUSCH AND HITLER'S ANGEL

Adolf Hitler was unlucky in love. But not half as unlucky as his women. Maria Reiter, just 16 when Hitler first approached her, tried to hang herself, but was saved by her brother. The actress Renate Mueller jumped (or was thrown) from the window of a sanitarium. Eva Braun tried to kill herself in 1932, before she and Adolph celebrated their 1945 marriage with a joint suicide the next day. And, in 1931, Hitler's niece, Angelika 'Geli' Raubal, daughter of his half-sister, was found dead from a gunshot wound in his Munich apartment. That death too was ruled a suicide.

The question of whether it was suicide or murder, and if the latter who committed the crime, is at the core of Kris Rusch's Hitler's Angel, originally published in the US in 1998, and now reprinted here by Max Crime, part of that list's adventurous mix of new work and reprints of lesser-known titles. This may be the best so far, a serious novel structured around the reminiscence of a long-since retired Munich detective, Fritz Stecher, famed for solving one notorious murder, but trapped in the politics surrounding Geli's death.

This was the time when the Nazi party was starting to make its impact on German politics, when the country was polarising between left and right, and brown shirts fought street battles with communists, and left a trail of enemies dead. Rusch does a good job of catching the chaotic and uncertain political atmosphere, if only second hand, as the novel is structured as Stecher's telling his tale to a young American student, researching his earlier success as a detective, and set against the 1972 Munich Olympic games. That setting ought to serve to remind us only 36 years had passed since the Berlin games, only 27 since the end of the war, yet it was a whole new world opening up. To be honest, Rusch doesn't make enough of this, mostly because the character of Annie, the student, is allowed to develop only in reaction to Fritz, and serve as his springboard.

Part of that relates to her resemblance to Fritz's wife, lost to the depravations of Germany in the years immediately after World War I, and here, subtly, is the strongest contrast of all in the book, between Fritz's controlled grief and the furious bitterness of the NSDAP, a bitterness which was shared widely enough in Germany to help vault them into power. This is Fritz's internal story: Rusch might have wrung more atmosphere out of Munich in both 1931 and 1972, but basically this is a book set in two places; Fritz's dingy apartment in the latter year, and Hitler's luxurious flat in 1931.

Geli's death was ruled a suicide without an autopsy being performed. Hitler was well alibied, but rumours abounded. His relationship with Geli had already been the object of salacious speculation in the anti-Nazi press, and there was no shortage of enemies, even within the party itself, who would have an interest in framing Hitler, or simple creating a scandal around him. Again, one might have liked to see more made of some of the potential suspects, Otto Strasser and the like, but the book's focus, via Fritz, is obviously on Herr Hitler himself.

Ron Rosenbaum once called this moment 'Hitler's Chappaquidick', while reviewing Norman Mailer's The Castle In The Forest. Rusch credits Rosenbaum's Vanity Fair article with triggering her interest in the case; given the timeline it's not unreasonable to think it had a similar effect on Ron Hansen, whose novel Hitler's Niece appeared the year after Rusch's. He also may be the man to blame for Mailer's never getting around to the promised continuation of his massive CIA novel, Harlot's Ghost; Mailer apparently got distracted while reading Rosenbaum's exceptional book Explaining Hitler, from which the Vanity Fair article was extracted. The book is an exegesis of studies of the 20th century's icon of evil. Rosenbaum, a natural skeptic, found most of them reductionist, that is, attempting to somehow get to the root of Hitler's evil, while leaving out the wider political, cultural, or social factors behind the Nazis. So it was with the Geli case. Attesting that he wanted to find Hitler guilty of the crime, he found himself unable to prove any such thing. In fact, although alibis are alibis, he performed a ruthless dissection of Ronald Heyman, who had previously made the strongest case for Hitler as Geli's killer. But the story goes deeper than that, because the nature of Hitler's alleged perversions, mainly coprophiliac, provides us with a motive, not only for him as killer, but for his supposed lovers as potential suicides, and, of course, for the deaths of millions in Europe.

This would appeal to Mailer, of course, who believed firmly in the power of male sexuality. In Oswald's Tale he had theorized that, had Marina Oswald actually put out for Lee on the night of October 21, 1963, JFK might not have been shot. Rosenbaum dismisses the idea that such ideas might be meaningful, but Rusch has Fritz merely drop them in to suggest why Geli might have been dissatisfied, why she and Hitler might have fought, and why she might have died. But again, this sexual and psychological deep focus underestimates Hitler, as surely as Hindenburg and Von Papen and so many others did on his rise to power and to domination of Europe.

The real suspense in Rusch's book comes as she builds up to two revelations, the big one as Fritz gets closer and closer to Hitler himself, and the other as we learn about Fritz's own life. In this sense we are like Anna, forced to move at Fritz's pace and accept his version, but perhaps not conclude that, even were Hitler the killer, and even had he been found guilty, that Germany would have moved in a different direction. That is an even more interesting piece of speculation.

Rusch has written novels under six different names, some just variations of her own name, but as far as I can see this is the only one published as Kris Rusch. It's a good enough book to deserve that special status, and it's a boon that Max Crime have brought it back into print.

NOTE: This review will appear also at Crime Time, www.crimetime.co.uk