Quin?s Shanghai Circus (3 page)

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 and 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

W
HO 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 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.

S
OME TWENTY YEARS AFTER
the end of the war with Japan a freighter arrived in Brooklyn with the largest collection of Japanese pornography ever assembled in a Western tongue. The owner of the collection, a huge, smiling fat man named Geraty, presented a passport to customs that showed he was a native-born American about as old as the century, an exile who had left the United States nearly four decades before.

The collection contained all the pornographic works written in Japan during the last three hundred and fifty years, or since the time when Japan first closed itself to the West. More important, it included rare manuscripts from several thirteenth-century Buddhist monasteries.

According to Geraty, the very existence of these manuscripts had never been suspected. The tales they told began harmlessly, but before the scholar reached the end of the second page he was confronted with astonishingly obscure practices, and by the beginning of the third page he was totally immersed in devices and dreams and masks, all serving the wildest sort of inversions.

The manuscripts were illustrated with ink drawings exquisitely detailed to show every hair. Even the cat hairs could be counted, where cats appeared.

For the officials at the Brooklyn customs house the sudden appearance of Geraty's collection was an uncommon event. Although they frequently handled questionable materials, never in anyone's memory had the pornography to be examined been of such vast scope.

Thus a second official immediately applied himself to the case, and a third soon joined the second. In fact by the end of Geraty's first day in New York there were no less than eight customs officials of differing ranks and seniority, representing a reliable spectrum of American ethnic and racial and cultural backgrounds, lined up behind a row of desks at one end of the spacious customs warehouse in Brooklyn, solemnly listening to Geraty deliver a lecture on the secret merits of his collection.

He noted at random, for example, in order to emphasize the artistry of the drawings, the patina that had been worked into the leather phalluses and the grain that showed in the spiraled ivory finger pieces. Because of these touches, he claimed, a specialist could easily tell whether the leather was cow or pig or whether the ivory was from north or south India.

The women depicted in the illustrations were as numerous as the men, but they were always shown with their own kind. There was no mixing of the sexes.

After pointing out the value of the manuscripts in the fields of animal husbandry, trade, and sociology, Geraty went on to discuss their literary and historical merits.

The manuscripts were invariably told in the first person. Therefore they were source material for modern Japanese fiction, which was also confessional.

The century under study, the thirteenth, was an era of national upheaval in Japan, an age of revolution led by innumerable orders of fanatical monks. Therefore the manuscripts were a record of the unknown thoughts of these warring monks at a time when Zen and the game of
Go,
the tea ceremony, rock gardens, and
No
plays and so many other unique Japanese arts, notorious for their refinement and austerity, first became revered throughout the islands.