Sinai Tapestry (2 page)

As mentioned,
Quin
was a bigger success with the critics than it was in the bookstores. Readers loved the novel, even though there were not nearly enough of them. But Whittemore was not deterred. Less than two years later he appeared in my office with an even more ambitious novel,
Sinai Tapestry
, the first volume of his Jerusalem Quartet. Set in the heyday of the British Empire, it takes place in Palestine during the middle of the nineteenth century. Foremost among the larger-than-life characters were a tall English aristocrat, the greatest swordsman, botanist, and explorer of Victorian England; a fanatical trappist monk who found the original Sinai Bible, which “denies every religious truth ever held by anyone;” and an Irish radical who had fled to Palestine disguised as a nun. My favorite was (and still is) Haj Harun, born three thousand years earlier, an ethereal wanderer through history: now an antiquities dealer dressed in a faded yellow cloak and sporting a Crusaders’ rusty helmet while pursuing his mission as defender of the Holy City. He had several previous incarnations: as a stone carver of winged lions during the Assyrian occupation, proprietor of an all-night grocery store under the Greeks, a waiter when the Romans were in power, and a distributor of hashish and goats for the Turks. Before I first went to Israel in 1977, Whittemore, who was then living in New York, gave me the names of several people in Jerusalem. One was named Mohammed, the owner of an antiquities gallery. When I finally tracked him down in the Old City I saw before me a fey character who, if he had been wearing a faded yellow cloak and a rusty helmet, would have been a dead ringer for Haj Harun.

Clearly Ted had been caught up in a new life in Jerusalem. During the preceding years when he had been living modestly in Crete he had the opportunity to do a great deal of reading and thinking. Crete had a rich history. It had been occupied by the Romans, conquered by the Arabs, Byzantines, and Venetians before becoming part of the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century. Now it was a quiet, out-of-the-way Greek island with few distractions for a penniless American expatriate. In other words, a perfect place for a former intelligence agent to take stock and decide what history was all about, to re-examine what he had learned as a Yale undergraduate.

While in Japan in the 1960s Whittemore had written two unpublished novels, one about the Japanese game of Go, the other about a young American expatriate living in Tokyo. In Crete he began to write again, slowly, awkwardly, experimenting with voice, style, and subject matter, distilling his experience in the Agency into that sweeping raucous epic,
Quin’s Shanghai Circus
. By the time he embarked on the Quartet, he was more assured, he was a more polished writer, and he had found a subject that was to engage him for the rest of his life: Jerusalem and the world of Christians, Arabs and Jews; faith and belief; mysticism and religious (and political) fanaticism; nineteenth century; European imperialism, twentieth century wars and terrorism. But above all Jerusalem, the City on the Hill, the Holy City. The novels would still be full of outrageous characters, the humor was still often grotesque and macabre, and there was violence aplenty. But there was also a new understanding of the mysteries of life.

The new novel, finally published in 1979, was
Jerusalem Poker
, the second volume of the Quartet. It involves a twelve-year poker game begun in the last days of December 1921 when three men sit down to play. The stakes were nothing less than the Holy City itself. Where else could a game for the control of Jerusalem be played but in the antiquities shop of Haj Harun? Actually, Ted did not come to live permanently (that is “permanently” according to his ways) in Jerusalem until he was well into writing the Quartet. His knowledge of Jerusalem was based initially on books, but later on he wandered endlessly through the crowded, teeming streets and Quarters of the Old City. Merchants of every kind, butchers, tanners, glass blowers, jewelers, silversmiths, and even iron mongers spoke nearly every known language and dressed in the vibrant and exotic costumes of the Middle East. I once remarked to Ted while we were making our way along a narrow passage in the Arab Quarter, that I fully expected we would run into Sinbad the Sailor coming the other way.

The next time I visited Jerusalem, Ted had settled down with Helen, an American painter, in a spacious apartment in a large, nineteenth-century stone building in the Ethiopian Church compound. The apartment overlooked a courtyard full of flowers and lemon trees. Over one wall there loomed a Cistercian convent, and around the corner there was a synagogue full of Orthodox rabbinical students praying twenty-four hours a-day, or so it seemed to me. And standing or quietly reading in the courtyard were the Ethiopian monks. One morning I woke at six in my sunlit room and heard the Cistercian nuns singing a cappella. They sounded like birds and I thought for a moment I was in heaven.

After a midday nap we usually headed for the Old City, invariably ending up in the same cafe, a pretentious name for what was little more than an outdoor tea garden where hot tea and sticky buns were served. The proprietor sat at one table interminably fingering worry beads and talking to friends, an ever-changing group of local merchants, money changers, students, and some unsavory hard-looking types. They all seemed to have a nodding acquaintance with Ted, who knew as much, if not more, about the Old City as its inhabitants.

By 1981, Whittemore was living in a studio apartment on Third Avenue in New York City. And he was writing steadily. I had left Holt earlier that spring for another publishing house and a young colleague, Judy Karasik, took over the editorial work on Whittemore’s new novel,
Nile Shadows
. After Ted died, she wrote the epilogue to this novel. It is one of the most moving accounts of an editor’s working and personal relationship with an author I have ever read. She should have given it as a eulogy at Whittemore’s funeral twelve years after
Nile Shadows
appeared.

Nile Shadows
is set in Egypt, it is 1942 and Rommel’s powerful Afrika Corps is threatening to overrun Egypt and seize control of the entire Middle East. A group of Whittemore’s characters, some old, some new, hold the fate of the world in their hands. At the very beginning of the novel, Stern, an idealistic visionary in
Sinai Tapestry
turned gun-runner a half century later, is killed by a grenade thrown into the doorway of a backstreet bar. Violence as well as mysticism dominates Whittemore’s novels. In
Quin’s Shanghai Circus
he had described with horrible abandon the “rape” of Nanking and
Sinai Tapestry
the sack of Smyrna in 1922 when the Turks butchered ten of thousands of Greek men, women, and children. A
Publishers Weekly
reviewer said of
Nile Shadows
: “One of the most complex and ambitious espionage stories ever written.” And a critic in
The Nation
said: “Whittemore is a deceptively lucid stylist. Were his syntax as cluttered as Pynchon’s or as conspicuously grand as Nabokov’s or Fuentes’, his virtually ignored novels might have received the attention they deserved.”

But sales still hadn’t caught up with the critics. By the spring of 1985, Ted was finishing the novel that was to be called
Jericho Mosaic
, the fourth of the Jerusalem Quartet. I was in Israel for the biennial Jerusalem International Book Fair. Afterwards, Ted suggested we drive down to Jericho, that oasis to the southeast of Jerusalem from which most of the caravans of Biblical times set out for the Levant, Asia Minor, and Africa. On the way we visited several Greek Orthodox monasteries in the Judean wilderness. Since they were built into solid rock at the bottom of isolated ravines reachable only on narrow paths, we had to leave the car up on the road and scramble down hillsides more suitable for mountain goats than a novelist and a New York editor. However, once we made it safely to the bottom, the monks proved to be extremely hospitable. Whittemore was a frequent visitor and the monks seemed to enjoy his company.

After being shown around the rocky quarters, not much more than elaborate caves, and consuming some dreadful retsina (the monks didn’t drink it themselves) we continued to Jericho and a typical lunch of dried figs, a bread-like pastry and melon and hot fragrant tea. Then we made our way to the Negev. Over the years Ted had befriended some of the local Bedouins and we were greeted like old friends at several encampments. We spent one night at an Israeli meteorological center/desert inn near a Nabatean ruin. There seemed to be antennae and electric sensors everywhere, and as we used to say in those days, gray men in London, Washington, Moscow, and Beijing could probably hear every sparrow-fart in the desert. In retrospect, I sometimes wonder if Ted had ever really retired? Was he still, in this case, visiting his “controller,” and using me as his cover?

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.