The Spooky Art (36 page)

Nonetheless, given the many centuries of anecdotal and much-skewed evidence on the subject, it is still not irrational to assume that phenomena of a certain kind can be regarded provisionally as magical in those particular situations where magic offers the only rational explanation for events that are otherwise inexplicable. Indeed, this is probably the common view. One explanation for the aggravated awe and misery that inhabited America in the days after the destruction of the Twin Towers was that the event was not only monstrous but brilliantly effected in the face of all the factors that could have gone wrong for the conspirators. The uneasy and not-to-be-voiced hypothesis that now lived as a possibility in many a mind was that the success of the venture had been fortified by the collateral assistance of magic. Few happenings can be more unsettling to the modern psyche than the suggestion that magic is cooperating with technology. It is equal to saying that machines have a private psychology and large events, therefore, may be subject to Divine or Satanic intervention.

So let us at least assume that magic may conceivably be present as an element in the very warp and woof of things. Anyone who is offended by this will not be interested in
Unholy Alliance.
Its first virtue, after all, is in its assiduous detail.

What augments the value of this work is the cold but understanding eye of the author. Since his knowledge of magic and magicians is intimate, one never questions whether he knows what he is writing about. Since he is also considerably disenchanted by the life practices of most of the magic workers, he is never taken in by assumptions of grandiosity or over-sweet New Age sentiments. He knows the fundamental flaw found in many occultists. It is the vice that brought them to magic in the first place—precisely, their desire to obtain power over others without
paying the price. The majority of occultists in his pages appear to be posted on the particular human spectrum that runs from impotence to greed. All too often they are prone, as a crew, to sectarian war, all-out cheating, gluttony, slovenliness, ill will, and betrayal. Exactly. They are, at whatever level they find themselves, invariably looking for that gift of the gods—power that comes without the virtue of having been earned.

The irony, of course, is that most of them, in consequence, pay large prices in ill health, failure, isolation, addiction, deterioration of their larger possibilities, even personal doom. Goethe did not conceive of
Faust
for too little.

Peter Levenda captures this paradox. What he also gives us is a suggestion that cannot be ignored: The occultists on both sides in the Second World War (although most particularly Himmler and the Nazis) did have some real effect on its history—most certainly not enough to have changed the outcome but enough to have altered motives and details we have been taking for granted. What comes through the pages of
Unholy Alliance
is the canny political sense Hitler possessed in relation to the separate uses of magic and magicians. Levenda’s dispassionate treatment of charged evidence is managed (no small feat) in a way to enable us to recognize that Hitler almost certainly believed in magic, and also knew that such belief had to be concealed in the subtext of his speeches and endeavors. Open avowal could be equal to political suicide.

Hitler was hell, therefore, on astrologers—and packed off many to concentration camps, especially after Rudolf Hess’s flight to England in 1941, did his best (and was successful) in decimating the Gypsy population of Europe, sneered publicly at seers, psychic gurus, fortune-tellers, all the small fry of the occult movement. He saw them, clearly, as impediments to his own fortunes, negative baggage to his reputation. Yet he also gave his support to the man he made into the second most important Nazi in existence, Heinrich Himmler, an occultist of no modest dimension.

It was as if Hitler lived within Engels’s dictum that “quantity changes quality.” A little magic practiced by a small magician can prove a folly or a personal enhancement; a larger involvement brings on the cannibalistic practices to be expected of a magicians’ society; and a huge but camouflaged involvement, the Nazi movement itself, with its black-shirted Knight Templars of
SS men, becomes an immense vehicle that will do its best to drive the world into a new religion, a new geography, a new mastery of the future.

Why Are We in Vietnam?
is the only novel I ever finished under the mistaken belief I was writing another. Living in Provincetown on the edge of those rare, towering, and windy dunes that give the tip of Cape Cod a fair resemblance to the desert of the Sahara, I had begun to think of a novel so odd and so horrible that I hesitated for years to begin it. I imagined a group of seven or eight bikers, hippies and studs plus a girl or two, living in the scrub thickets that sat in some of the valleys between the dunes. Only six feet high, those thickets were nonetheless forests, and if you could find a path through the thorns and cat briars, nobody could track you, not in a hurry. So I peopled the thickets with characters: My characters were as wild as anyone who ever came to Provincetown. It is not a tame place. Years ago, a first lady was once told it was “the Wild West of the East,” and that is not a bad description. The tip of Cape Cod curls in on itself like a spiral—the long line of the dunes comes around like the curve of one’s palm and fingers as they close into a fist. It is one of the very few places in America where one comes to the end of the road for a more profound reason than real estate ceasing to be profitable. In Provincetown, the land runs out, and you are surrounded by the sea.

So it is a strange place. The Pilgrims landed there before they went on to Plymouth—America began here. The Pilgrims lost interest in scrub pine, mournful winds, and sand. They moved on, left ghosts. Whaling captains settled in later, left ghosts. In winter, the town is filled with spirits. One can go mad in that rainy climate waiting for March to end. It is a place for murderers and suicides. If decades went by without a single recorded homicide, that record ended abruptly with a crime of true carnage. Some years ago, a young Portuguese from a family of fishermen killed four girls, dismembered their bodies, and buried the pieces in twenty small and scattered graves.

That catastrophe was not a good deal worse than anything I had already contemplated for my gang, since I conceived of them making nocturnal trips from the dunes into town, where, out of the sheer boredom of an existence not nearly intense enough to satisfy their health, they would commit murders of
massive brutality and then slip back to the dunes. Motiveless murders. I saw a string of such crimes.

I was, as I say, in fear of the book. I loved Provincetown and did not think that was a good way to write about it. The town is so naturally eerie in mid-winter and provides such sense of omens waiting to be magnetized into lines of force that the novel in my mind seemed more a magical object than a fiction, a black magic.

Nonetheless, I began the book in the spring of ’66. It attracted me too much not to begin. Yet because I could not thrust Provincetown into such literary horrors without preparation, I thought I would start with a chapter about hunting bear in Alaska. A prelude. I would have two tough rich boys, each as separated from social convention as any two rich boys could be—Texans I would make them, out of reserve memories of Texans I had served with in the 112
^th
Cavalry out of San Antonio. The boys would still be young, still mean rather than uncontrollably murderous—the hunting might serve as a bridge to get them ready for more. They would come back from the Alaskan hunting trip ready to travel; Provincetown would eventually receive them.

Now, anyone who reads the book which this preface serves will see that nobody ever gets to Provincetown. The chapter on hunting becomes half a dozen chapters; it ends up being all of the book. If I wrote those chapters wondering how long it would take to extricate myself with novelistic integrity from all the elaborations of the hunt I seemed more and more bound to get into, it was not until those boys were back in Dallas and I was getting ready to move them East that I realized two things:

(1) I had nothing further to say about them.

(2) Even if I did, I could no longer believe that Tex and D.J. could still be characters in the Provincetown novel. They had another quality by now.

So I lived with my manuscript for a few months and ended by recognizing that I hadn’t been too bright. I had written a novel, not a prelude. The book was done. Later, a number of readers would think
Why Are We in Vietnam?
was far and away my best book. I thought I had never written one with so wild and happy a humor.

In the aftermath, I was less certain, however. For when Sharon Tate was murdered in the summer of ’69 and the world heard of Charles Manson, I could wonder what state of guilt I
might have been in if I had written that novel of desert murderers. How then could I ever have been certain Manson had not been sensitive to its message in the tribal air?

But then writing has its own occult force. At best, we never know where our writing comes from, or who gives it to us. Jack Kennedy’s name is invoked in the first sentence of
An American Dream;
nine lines farther down that page a man named Kelly is mentioned. Later in the same chapter we learn that Kelly’s middle name is Oswald—Barney Oswald Kelly. That chapter appeared in
Esquire
about a month after the assassination, but it had been written three months earlier, a coincidence to force one to contemplate the very design of coincidence.

So too had I written in
Barbary Shore
about a secret agent named McLeod, who had been, in his time, a particularly important Soviet agent. He lived in a cheap room on the top floor of a cheap rooming house just across the hall from the narrator. Writing that book, I always found it hard to believe that such a man would be found in such a place, and the simple difficulty of not quite believing what I wrote did not help to speed the writing of the book. A year after it was published, I rented a room in a dank old building with high ceilings, called Ovington Studios, on Fulton Street in Brooklyn, not half a mile from the rooming house in
Barbary Shore
, and on the floor below during those ten years I kept the studio was Colonel Rudolph Abel, the most important Soviet spy in America—or, at least, so he was described by the FBI when the arrest was finally made.

We will never know if primitive artists painted their caves to show a representation or whether the moving hand was looking to placate the forces above and the forces below. Sometimes I think the novelist fashions a totem just as much as an aesthetic and that his real aim, not even known necessarily to himself, is to create a diversion in the fields of dread, a sanctuary in some of the arenas of magic. The flaws of his work can even be a part of his magical strength, as if his real intent in writing is to alter the determinations of that invisible finger which has written and moved on. By such logic, many a book is a totem, not empty of amulets for the author against curses, static, and the malignity of electronic air.

The unconscious can lead one to startling conclusions. In
Ancient Evenings
, I named my protagonist Menenhetet and occasionally made it Meni for short. A couple of years later I came
across the translated text of an inscription on an ancient Egyptian temple wall that described the battle of Kadesh, a key event in the novel. In this inscription was mentioned one Menni, Ramses the Second’s equerry, which was exactly Menenhetet’s role in that part of the book. Somehow, I did not think of the coincidence as eerie—comfirmative, rather, as if it proved that there was some very good reason I devoted so many years to the tome.

The story is that Robert Rauschenberg was once given the gift of a pastel from Willem de Kooning. Rauschenberg, with de Kooning’s permission, erased the pastel and then signed it “Pastel by de Kooning Erased by Robert Rauschenberg,” after which he sold it. The story bothered me. There was something profound there, but how to get ahold of it? Then it came to me: Rauschenberg was saying that the artist has the same right to print money as the financier. Money is nothing but authority imprinted upon emptiness.

I laid the story to rest and was content until the day I thought, Maybe the person who bought the pastel was neither a gambler nor an investor so aware of chic in painting that he knew he could make a profit from reselling it. Maybe if a truly talented painter erases the work of another truly talented painter, there’s a resonance, an echo, in the lost work. If, let’s say, Fidel Castro had executed Charles de Gaulle and buried him himself, that would not be ordinary burial ground. Students of the occult would pay great attention to the aura about the place. So I thought maybe that’s what’s transpiring here—some echo of de Kooning’s original work might be
fortifying
the person who purchased it. Therefore, I am obsessed with the story again. One of two possibilities exists: Either this aesthetic act was an outrage, or it advances our comprehension of the occult.

Famous plant-man Backster, attaching the electrodes of his polygraph to a philodendron one night, wonders in the wake of this passing impulse how to test the plant for some emotional reaction. Abruptly, a current courses through the philodendron at the horror of this thought. When Backster cuts or burns the leaf, however, the polygraph registers little: The plant is numb. (Its telepathic sensitivity seems to be its life; its suffering, an abstention from life.) The experiment suggests plants may be a natural
species of wireless. (What, indeed, did Picasso teach us if not that every form offers up its own scream?) Radio is then no more than a prosthetic leg of communication, whereas plants speak to plants and are aware of the death of animals on the other side of the hill. Some artists might even swear they have known this from the beginning, for they would see themselves as stimulants who inject perception into the blind vision of the century. (And, like a junkie, does the century move into apathy from the super-brilliance of its injections?)