My wife and I are expected in Provincetown, the resort town at the very tip of Cape Cod, at eleven AM; we arrive close to the hour and are met by Norman Mailer and his wife Norris. After greetings, he asks, “Have you finished it?” referring to Harlot’s Ghost, his huge CIA novel due out in October from Random House. It is an unusually cool day in early July and we are standing in Mailer’s living room, a large room six steps from Cape Cod Bay. Norris’s striking paintings cover the walls. The three-story, red-brick, ivy-covered house stands in a long row of beachfront homes a couple of miles from the end of the last conch-shell curve of the Cape. From his study window on the third floor he can see the full 180 degree curve of shore and bend of bay. The guides on sightseeing buses point out the house and his study window, usually open, to tourists. Mailer has summered in P-Town for more than forty years.
I answer that I finished the bound galleys, all 1344 pages, while riding through Orleans, less than an hour back down the mid-Cape highway. The book’s length, I offer, may be an American record, surpassing James Jones’s Some Came Running, which weighed in at 1266 pages. Mailer, a longtime communicant in the church of organic form, shrugs off length, but notes that Random House may add a line to each page, thus trimming this novelissimo to a few millimeters under 1300 pages. Part One, that is. Part Two will continue the story of Herrick Hubbard, CIA agent, his father “Cal,” also a CIA agent, his godfather Hugh Montague, another CIA agent (code name “Harlot”), and Montague’s wife, Kittredge. She too is a CIA agent and, as we learn in the first pages of Part One, later marries young Hubbard. His memoir of the 40s, 50s and early 60s makes up the bulk of Harlot’s Ghost. The novel ends with the words “TO BE CONTINUED” and Mailer explains that Part Two will cover the period from 1965–1983. In other words, the time frame of the completed two-part novel will correspond to the span of Mailer’s writing life up to the publication of his 1983 novel, Ancient Evenings, set long ago and far away in Egypt. The year that the Egyptian novel was published Mailer said that he thought it was impossible to “write an all-encompassing novel about America.” His next novel, Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1984), a murder mystery set in P-Town, clearly lacked this ambition.